Don Quixote

First published in 1605, with its second part following in 1615, Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote follows an ageing country gentleman who, having lost himself in tales of chivalry, sets out across the Spanish countryside to revive the age of knights-errant. Renaming himself Don Quixote, he takes the practical farmer Sancho Panza as his squire, and together they encounter windmills mistaken for giants, roadside inns transformed into castles, and a world that rarely corresponds to the knight’s grand imaginings.

Part comedy, part adventure and part searching meditation on the relationship between illusion and reality, Don Quixote gently unsettles the boundary between madness and idealism, exposing both the absurdity and the dignity of its hero’s convictions. Cervantes’s inventive narrative, playful treatment of storytelling and richly drawn characters helped shape the modern novel, influencing generations of writers across Europe and beyond. Beneath its satire of chivalric romance lies a tender, enduring question: what becomes of the world when we insist on seeing it as it might be, rather than as it is?

From the book

“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”

— Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

On Don Quixote

“Don Quixote — the first modern novel — remains the finest.”

— Harold Bloom, The Guardian