A young Brahmin leaves his father's house to seek the meaning of existence, joining the wandering ascetics, sitting at the feet of the Buddha, plunging into the sensual world of commerce and love, and finding illumination at last beside a river whose voice contains all the voices of creation. Hesse wrote this tale in the early 1920s, drawing on Indian philosophy to compose what is less a novel than a parable rendered in prose of crystalline simplicity. Each phase of Siddhartha's journey strips away another certainty, another teaching, until what remains is not doctrine but experience itself. The book has traveled the world for a century now, finding readers at exactly the moment they need to hear that wisdom cannot be taught, only lived.