Don Quichotte

Alonso Quixano, an aging gentleman of La Mancha, has read so many chivalric romances that he loses his wits and resolves to revive knight-errantry himself. Renaming himself Don Quixote, donning rusty armor, and recruiting the earthy farmer Sancho Panza as his squire, he rides out to right wrongs, defend the helpless, and win glory in the name of his imagined lady, Dulcinea del Toboso.

What follows is a series of misadventures — famously charging at windmills he takes for giants — in which the Don's noble delusions collide, again and again, with a hard and unheroic world. Across two volumes, Cervantes plays the knight's madness against Sancho's common sense, and idealism against reality, in a story that is by turns hilarious, absurd, and unexpectedly moving.

Widely regarded as the first modern novel and one of the greatest books ever written, Don Quixote is a sprawling comic masterpiece about imagination, folly, friendship, and the stubborn human need to believe in something larger than ourselves.