A passionate plea to rediscover our capacity for amazement, Sophie's World is more than a mere mystery. It is also the first novel to present a complete--and entertaining--history of philosophy. "A literary surprise success such as has not been seen since Umberto Eco's learned cloister-thriller The Name of the Rose."

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 solve this riddle, Sophie uses her new knowledge of philosophy, but the truth is far stranger than she could have imagined.