
Chosen one of the Best Books of the Year by Publisher’s Weekly, Vogue, and The New Yorker, and a New York Times Editor’s Choice, Activities of Daily Living is a debut novel that feels as if it’s written by a self-confident and experienced craftsman.
Seventeen years ago, I read Colm Toibin’s fictional biography of Henry James called The Master. It was the best book I’d read in a long time, the marvelously imagined life of a great writer. It got rave reviews. Now, with The Magician, Toibin has done it again, this time with life of Thomas Mann, a work equally persuasive, intimate, and marvelous in its power to compel belief.
A work of tremendous scope and ambition, this novel dares to imagine what it would take to protect the entire world from environmental collapse.