Sophie's World

Fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find two strange anonymous notes in her mailbox, each posing a single unsettling question: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" Soon a mysterious philosopher named Alberto Knox begins sending her a correspondence course in the history of Western thought, walking her from the pre-Socratics through Plato, Descartes, Kant, Marx, and Sartre.

But the lessons are tangled up in a stranger mystery. Sophie keeps receiving postcards addressed to a girl named Hilde Møller Knag, a girl she has never met, and small impossible things begin happening around her. As her philosophical education deepens, Sophie starts to suspect that the questions she's being taught to ask apply uncomfortably well to her own reality.

First published in Norway in 1991 and translated into dozens of languages, Sophie's World is both an accessible primer on the great questions of philosophy and a playful, mind-bending novel about the nature of existence. Jostein Gaarder threads a genuine survey of ideas through a story that keeps quietly folding back on itself, rewarding curious readers of all ages.