A slim, melancholy triptych following Knulp, a charming wanderer who moves from town to town, briefly entering other people’s lives before moving on again.

Across three linked stories, Hesse builds a portrait of someone both loved and fundamentally unmoored: too restless for ordinary domestic life, but increasingly aware of the cost of remaining outside it.

First published in 1915, Knulp is one of Hesse’s quieter early works, concerned with freedom, loneliness, friendship, illness and the tension between belonging and escape. The book has the feel of a folk tale stripped of sentimentality: episodic, tender, and shadowed from the beginning by the knowledge that wandering cannot continue forever.

Picador / Pan Books, London, 1981. Sixth printing of the Picador edition, first published 1974. Paperback. Translated from the German; this English translation first published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape in 1972.