Siddhartha

Siddhartha, the handsome son of a Brahmin in ancient India, leaves his comfortable home with his friend Govinda to search for enlightenment. He lives with wandering ascetics, meets the Buddha himself but decides he must find his own way, and then plunges into the world: love with the courtesan Kamala, wealth as a merchant, and finally disgust. At last, beside a river, a simple ferryman teaches him to listen.

Hermann Hesse (1877–1962), a German-Swiss writer whose family had worked as missionaries in India, published Siddhartha in 1922 after his own spiritual crisis. Short and written in calm, lyrical prose, it became a cult book in the 1960s, and Hesse received the Nobel Prize in 1946. Read it beside Tagore's Sadhana.