Synopses & Reviews
One day when Sophie comes home from school, she finds two questions in her mail: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?"
Before she knows it, she is pondering all the great questions of Western philosophy (from the Greeks to Kant, to Marx and Freud) with a mysterious mentor. But Sophie is also receiving a separate batch of equally unusual letters. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up in Sophie's world?
To unravel this riddle, Sophie uses her new knowledge of philosophy, but the truth is far stranger than she could have imagined.
Review
"Sophie's World is sheer delight. How I wish I'd had it during my college freshman survey of philosophy!" Madeleine L'Engle
Review
"Involving and often humorous." USA Today
Review
"Gaarder pulls off the difficult feat of blending philosophy and entertainment." School Library Journal
Review
"Sophie's World [is] Gaarder's history of Western philosophy embedded in a science fiction-like novel...[and I can] understand the unusual enthusiasm the book has generated....[In] an entertaining brainteaser of a novel....Sophie thinks like a Platonist in the early part of the course, like an empiricist in the middle, and like an existentialist toward the end." Books & Culture
Review
"This entertainingly framed outline of Western thought...concerns the education of fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen, who turns fifteen, and comes to terms with her status as a fictional character, by the end of the novel." John Updike
Synopsis
One day Sophie comes home from school to find two questions in her mail--who are you? and where does the world come from? Before she knows it, Sophie is enrolled in a correspondence course with a mysterious philosopher. But Sophie is receiving a separate batch of equally unusual letters. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up in Sophie's world?