Sophie’s World

A novel built around a history of Western philosophy. Sophie Amundsen, a fourteen-year-old Norwegian girl, finds two notes in her letterbox asking "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?". They are the start of a correspondence course from a mysterious teacher, Alberto Knox, who leads her from myth and the Pre-Socratic natural philosophers through Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Berkeley and Kant, the Romantics, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, Darwin and Freud, and finally Sartre. Each lesson is pitched for a young reader but stays faithful to the ideas. Alongside the lessons runs a puzzle: Sophie keeps finding postcards addressed to another girl, Hilde, from her father, a UN officer serving in Lebanon. As the mystery grows, the novel turns its own lessons about reality, illusion and freedom back on Sophie herself.

It is still the gentlest complete tour of Western philosophy, and the story makes each idea stick by putting to the reader the same questions Sophie is asked.