Jostein Gaarder

Wanting to understand the most fundamental questions of the universe isn't the province of ivory-tower intellectuals alone, as this book's enormous popularity has demonstrated. A young girl, Sophie, becomes embroiled in a discussion of philosophy with a faceless correspondent. At the same time, she must unravel a …

Jostein Gaarder had an unlikely international success with Sophie's World, a novelized exploration of western philosophy through the eyes of a young girl. This is an earlier work, translated from the Norwegian by Sarah Jane Hails. This fable-like story dabbles in philosophy too, though more lightly. It tells of a …

THE CHRISTMAS MYSTERY transcends all barriers. We all love a beadtime story and here we have a philosophical meditation wrapped in the simple clothes of a journey across Europe to Bethlehem. The qualities of wonder and enquiry that readers loved in SOPHIE'S WORLD are as strong as ever in this beautiful and mysterious …

Conversations about life and death, between a girl and an angel.It's almost Christmas. Cecilia lies sick in bed as her family bustle around her to make her last Christmas as special as possible. Cecilia has cancer. An angel steps through her window. So begins a spirited and engaging series of conversations between …

A chance meeting on the Fijian island of Taveuni is the trigger for a fascinating and mysterious novel that intertwines the stories of John Spooke, an English author who is grieving for his dead wife; Frank Andersen, a Norwegian evolutionary biologist estranged from his wife Vera; and an enigmatic Spanish couple, Ana …

From the author of SOPHIE'S WORLD, 'A masterful mixture of fantasy and reality...a simply wonderful read' SHE.Panina Manina, a trapeze artist, falls and breaks her neck. As the ringmaster bends over her, he notices an amulet of amber around her neck, the same trinket he had given his own lost child, who was swept away …

A playful and inventive work from the bestselling author of SOPHIE'S WORLD. A box of Latin manuscripts comes to light in an Argentine flea market. An apocryphal invention by some 17th or 18th century scolar, or a transcript of what it appears to be - a hitherto unheard of letter to St Augustine to a woman he renounced …