Thomas Mann lived what is perhaps western literature’s oldest story: displacement and yearning for a lost home. Colm Tóibín’s new novel The Magician imagines Mann’s time as a refugee with unflinching precision: the loneliness, the guilt, the bureaucratic nuisance. Taken in by America, the 1929 Nobel Prize-winner and “second most important German alive after Einstein” is warned that he faces being “sent back on the first boat to Czechoslovakia” by a geographically illiterate state official.