The river is the best character in it and I mean that as the highest praise.

I read this in three sittings in a garden centre cafe while my wife looked at bedding plants, which is not the Ganges, but the tea was hot and nobody hurried me.

It's a small book with an enormous heart. A young man leaves everything, twice, and goes off looking for the Truth, and finds it in the end not in the forest with the ascetics and not in the city with the merchants and the beautiful Kamala, but sitting beside a river and listening to it. The river says Om. The river holds every voice at once. Time is not real. I know exactly how that sounds written down in a review; on the page it does not sound like that at all, it sounds like something being quietly explained to you by somebody who is not trying to sell you anything.

Where it wobbles for me is the middle. The years of money and dice and Kamaswami are told at arm's length, in summary, and I never felt the pull of that life, so his escape from it cost him nothing that I could feel. And Kamala deserved better than to be a lesson with a garden.

But Vasudeva the ferryman is one of the loveliest people I have met in a book, and the last twenty pages with Govinda are as close to peace as prose gets.

Eight, then. I've bought a copy for my brother, who will not read it.