The Tin Drum
  • Published: 22 June 2017
  • ISBN: 9781448180103
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 576

The Tin Drum

Formats & editions
Paperback
7 Jan 2025
Paperback
1 Dec 2010
EBook
3 Aug 2017
EBook
22 Jun 2017
Hardback
25 Jun 1993
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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.

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.
  • Published: 22 June 2017
  • ISBN: 9781448180103
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 576
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About the author

Günter Grass

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.

portrait photo of Günter Grass

Also by Günter Grass

Local Anaesthetic
The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising
Of All That Ends
From Germany to Germany
The Box
Peeling the Onion
The Flounder
See all

Praise for The Tin Drum

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

Julian Mitchell, Sunday Times

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

Daily Telegraph

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

John Irving

Grass is one of the master fabulists of our age

Michael Ratcliffe, The Times

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

David Lodge, Spectator