Demian

Emil Sinclair, a boy from a respectable, pious family, is drawn into lies and fear by a bully, and is rescued by a mysterious older schoolmate, Max Demian, who teaches him to question everything he has been told about good and evil. As Sinclair grows into a young man, through loneliness, drink and religious searching, Demian's ideas, and the image of a bird breaking out of its egg towards the god Abraxas, in whom good and evil are united, guide him towards his true self, until the First World War breaks out.

Hermann Hesse published the novel in 1919 under the pen name Emil Sinclair, after undergoing Jungian psychoanalysis, and it became a cult book for the generation that came home from the war: 'The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world.' This is the first English translation, of 1923. Read Siddhartha.