The Glass Bead Game (Picador Classics), by Hermann Hesse

Eleven years in the writing and published three years before his Nobel Prize award, this is Hesse's great novel, the epitome of his creative credo. Taking the form of a biography of Joseph Knecht, it is set centuries into the future in the province of Castilia, a disintegrating society where an intellectual élite plays out the game of the title - a quest for perfection that synthesizes the I Ching and the astrologer's art. When Knecht rejects the esoteric in an attempt to resuscitate his dying homeland, his final suicide is at once a symbol of despair and an exemplary supreme sacrifice.

*A new English version of Das Glasperlenspiel which lifts the whole novel on to a higher plane'

The Times

Translated from the German by Richard and Clara Winston.