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Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World is an exciting coming-of-age novel that thrives on its contradictions.
It is a page-turning science fiction adventure as well as a history of Western philosophy―from the discourses of ancient Greece to debates about the Big Bang.
The games begin when fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen finds two notes in her mailbox. One note asks, "Who are you?" The other asks, "Where does the world come from?" From here, with the aid of a devoted but mysterious instructor, Sophie sets off on a fantastic philosophical saga that will take her far beyond her small Norwegian hometown. Letters give way to lectures, questions give way to quests, and the dimensions of Sophie's world (as well as our own) grow ever wider, deeper, and richer.
"First, think a beginner's guide to philosophy ... Next, imagine a fantasy novel―something like a modern-day version of Through the Looking Glass. Meld these disparate genres, and what do you get? Well, what you get is an improbable international bestseller ... [A] tour de force." ―Time
This information about Sophie's World was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jostein Gaarder is the author of Sophie's World, an international bestseller that has been translated into more than 50 languages. There are over 30 million copies in print. He was born in Oslo, Norway, in 1952. He taught high-school philosophy for several years before publishing a collection of short stories in 1986 and, shortly thereafter, his first two novels, The Solitaire Mystery and Sophie's World, and several others since then. He lives in Oslo with his family.
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