Spirituality & Faith

Journeys of faith, meaning, and transcendence.

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A young Brahmin in ancient India leaves home to seek spiritual enlightenment, passing through asceticism, worldly pleasure, and commerce before finding peace by a river. Hesse's lyrical distillation of Buddhist and Hindu thought.

The Chief Priest of Ulu in an Igbo village struggles to maintain his authority against the encroachment of British colonial rule and rival Christian missions. Achebe's most technically complex novel and, some critics argue, his finest.

The Gospel According to Jesus Christ

Saramago reimagines the life of Jesus, born from ordinary lust and guilt, who makes a deal with God and the Devil. The Portuguese government blocked the novel from a European literary prize, prompting Saramago's permanent move to the Canary Islands.

Jorge Luis Borges

Seventeen stories including the title piece, in which a point in space contains all other points, allowing one to see everything simultaneously. Along with Ficciones, the collection that defines Borges's mature short fiction.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich

A high-court judge in 19th-century Russia falls terminally ill and is forced to confront the emptiness of his outwardly successful life. Considered one of the greatest novellas ever written, it distils Tolstoy's moral philosophy into 90 pages.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Prince Myshkin, a Christ-like figure afflicted with epilepsy, returns to Russia after years in a Swiss sanatorium and enters a society that cannot accommodate his radical goodness. A study in the incompatibility of moral purity and the world.

The Brothers Karamazov

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky's final novel centres on three brothers and the murder of their debauched father. A profound meditation on faith, doubt, free will, and moral responsibility that Freud called "the most magnificent novel ever written."

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