The Prophet

Almustafa has waited twelve years in the city of Orphalese for the ship that will carry him home. When it finally appears, the people gather and ask him to speak before he goes, and he answers them one subject at a time: love, marriage, children, giving, work, joy and sorrow, crime and punishment, freedom, reason and passion, friendship, prayer, beauty and death. Each answer is a short prose poem built on images rather than arguments, and the book's best-known lines, such as the reminder that our children are not our children but the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself, come from these replies.

Kahlil Gibran, born in 1883 in Bsharri in the mountains of Lebanon, wrote The Prophet in English in New York and published it in 1923 with his own drawings. It became one of the most widely read books of the twentieth century and has been translated into dozens of languages, Arabic among them. Mark F. Smith reads all twenty-eight chapters alone, in an hour and a half: a book to hear in one sitting.