The Originals Don Quixote

About this book

Author: Miguel de Cervantes Publication: Om Books International Pages: 992pages Format: Paperback There is no book so bad...that it does not have something good in it. One of the earliest classics from the Spanish Golden Age known as ‘the first modern novel’, Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote was published in two volumes. The first volume published in 1605, became a runaway success. Ten years later, in 1615, the second volume was published. Having devoured innumerable chivalric romances, Alonso Quixano, under the name Don Quixote de la Mancha, sets out on an adventure to restore order in the world. Sancho Panza, his faithful squir*, responds to Quixote’s sermons on knighthood with wit and pragmatism. During his expedition, the knight-errant visits an inn imagining it to be a castle, fights with impudent sorcerers, chases windmills thinking them to be giants, and steals a barber’s basin mistaking it to be the mythic Mambrino’s helmet among other absurdities. Through his protagonist’s ludicrous transformation, Cervantes, not only redefined the form of the novel but also created a thinking, critical reader. “If there is one novel you should read before you die, it is Don Quixote,” said Ben Okri, Booker Prize winner, of this masterpiece.