Death in Venice

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
Gustav von Aschenbach is a celebrated German writer, ennobled for a lifetime of disciplined work, widowed young and devoted to the idea that great art comes from iron self-control. Exhausted and restless in Munich, he gives in to a sudden longing to travel and makes his way south, at last to Venice and to a grand hotel on the beach of the Lido.

There, among the international guests, he notices a Polish boy of extraordinary beauty, and a fascination begins that he cannot master. Day after day he watches the boy on the beach, follows the family through the narrow streets of the city, and puts off his departure, while an unspoken sickness spreads through Venice and the authorities hide the truth from the tourists. The man who built his life on control is carried toward everything he once refused.

Published in 1912, Death in Venice is the work by which Thomas Mann is most widely known: a short, exquisitely shaped novella about beauty, desire, art and mortality, and one of the masterpieces of modern European fiction. This new translation presents the complete novella, read in full.