Let Ω ⊂ R N , N 2, be a bounded domain. We consider the following quasilinear problem depending on a real parameter λ > 0:where f (t) is a nonlinearity that grows like e t N/N−1 as t → ∞ and behaves like t α , for some α ∈ (0, N − 1), as t → 0 + . More precisely, we require f to satisfy assumptions (A1)-(A5) in Section 1. With these assumptions we show the existence of Λ > 0 such that (P λ ) admits at least two solutions for all λ ∈ (0, Λ), one solution for λ = Λ and no solution for all λ > Λ. We also study the problem (P λ ) posed on the ball B 1 (0) ⊂ R N and show that the assumptions (A1)-(A5) are sharp for obtaining global multiplicity. We use a combination of monotonicity and variational methods to show multiplicity on general domains and asymptotic analysis of ODEs for the case of the ball.