This is the book I have recommended and gifted to people more than all others. I read it as a young teenager and it had a profound effect upon me. The Prophet is the masterpiece of Kahlil Gibran, published originally in 1923. It is like fine wine and poetry, to be digested slowly, with the reader intermittently sighing ‘ahh’ from page to page.
The story is simple enough, a wise man is returning home after living in a distant city for a number of years, and as he is leaving the townsfolk come to ask him questions, ranging across different topics essential to life, which he then expounds upon – he speaks of love, marriage, children, giving, eating and drinking, work, joy and sorrow, housing, clothes, buying and selling, crime and punishment, laws, freedom, reason and passion, pain, self-knowledge, teaching, friendship, talking, time, good and evil, prayer, pleasure, beauty, religion and death.
It is truly something to read, and re-read every now and again. It is a great read for pausing and reflecting upon life and how we live it. Gibran wrote many interesting and insightful books, essays and poems, which I will link to elsewhere, but if you were to choose only one to read, this would be it: