Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy

One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: Who are you? and Where does the world come from? From that strange―but irresistible―beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with these and other questions that explore matters both small and large, some that take her mind far beyond what she knows of her family and life in her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving a separate batch of equally unusual letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up in Sophie's world? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must make use of the philosophy she is learning―but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.

A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, having been translated into forty-five languages and with over twenty million copies in print.