Günter Grass

Ralph Manheim

the-tin-drum

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more

source_10558

By signing up, I confirm that I'm over 16. To find out what personal data we collect and how we use it, please visit our <a href="/company/about-us/notices/privacy-policy/">Privacy Policy</a>

Keep an eye out for a confirmation in your inbox

Stories, ideas and giveaways to help you spark young imaginations

source_10972

The latest books, activities and tips to help you grow little readers

source_10975

About us

About Us (Header 4)

john-le-carre-a-legacy-of-spies-960-2.jpg

Margaret Atwood

Richard Osman

Malorie Blackman

George Orwell

marian_keyes_mobile_320x200px.png

Elif Shafak

shonfaye

Authors (Header 3)

Books (Header 2)

Company

Features (Header 1)

Penguin Shop (Header 5)

Useful links

The Tin Drum

Of All That Ends

Local Anaesthetic

The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising

Diary 1990

From Germany to Germany

Tales from the Darkroom

The Box

Peeling the Onion

Dog Years

The Flounder

Cat and Mouse

From the Diary of a Snail

The Call of the Toad

The finest editions available of the world's greatest classics from Homer to Achebe, Tolstoy to Ishiguro, Proust to Pullman, printed on a fine acid-free, cream-wove paper that will not discolour with age, with sewn, full cloth bindings and silk ribbon markers, and at remarkably low prices. All books include substantial introductions by major scholars and contemporary writers, and comparative chronologies of literary and historical context.

It's here! Browse the 2024 Penguin Christmas gift guide

This is a big book in every sense, full of extraordinary scenes and characters: even on a single reading it seems prodigally rich in comic invention, and demands to be worried at time and again

Grass wrote with fury, love, derision, slapstick, pathos - all with an unforgiving conscience

Grass is one of the master fabulists of our age

The novel is as monstrous as its hero, pullalating with a kind of anti-life... Gunter Grass may have written the nearest thing to a literary masterpiece his generation is capable of producing

Funny, macabre, disgusting, blasphemous, pathetic, horrifying, erotic, it is an endless delirium, an outrageous phantasmagoria in which dust from Goethe, Hans Andersen, Swift, Rabelais, Joyce, Aristophanes and Rochester dances on the point of a needle in the flame of a candle that was not worth the game

The publication of The Tin Drum in 1959 launched Günter Grass as an author of international repute. Bitter and impassioned, it delivers a scathing dissection of the years from 1925 to 1955 through the eyes of Oskar Matzerath, the dwarf whose manic beating on the toy of his retarded childhood fantastically counterpoints the accumulating horrors of Germany and Poland under the Nazis.

On his third birthday Oskar decides to stop growing. While beating his tin drum he recounts his extraordinary life in this classic and essential German novel.

Günter Grass (1927–2015) was Germany’s most celebrated post-war writer. He was a creative artist of remarkable versatility: novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, graphic artist. Grass’s first novel, The Tin Drum, is widely regarded as one of the finest novels of the twentieth century, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999.

The Tin Drum

Select a format:

Retailers:

Summary

Reviews

About the author

Günter Grass

More from this Author

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter