The Solitaire Mystery

The Solitaire Mystery (Norwegian: Kabalmysteriet) is a 1990 fantasy novel by Jostein Gaarder, the Norwegian author of the best-selling Sophie's World. Its main target audience is young adults, but the themes of the book transcend any age group.

The Solitaire Mystery, as with Sophie's World, has a philosophical content but, unlike Sophie's World, it does not explicitly mention philosophers and theories; thus readers of the book may be unaware that they are actually engaging in philosophy.

The book follows two seemingly separate stories:

A 12-year-old boy, Hans-Thomas, and his father are driving through Europe on a journey to locate and bring home the boy's estranged mother. Whilst on their journey, a strange little bearded man at a petrol station gives Hans-Thomas a magnifying glass, saying mystically: "You'll need it!" and persuades them to drive the long route that takes them through a small village by the name of Dorf. Not long afterwards, Hans-Thomas and his father stop at a roadside café in this village, then Hans-Thomas wanders around the village and gets a giant sticky bun from the village's kind baker to eat on his journey. To Hans-Thomas's great surprise, hidden inside the sticky bun is a tiny book with writing so small that it cannot be read with the naked eye. Hans-Thomas begins to read the tiny book using his new magnifying glass and the story then alternates between Hans-Thomas's journey and the story in the sticky bun book.

The sticky bun book tells the story of an old baker whose grandfather gave him a drink of a wonderful liquid he called Rainbow Fizz (Rainbow Soda in the American edition). It came from an island which the grandfather had been shipwrecked on as a young man. On the island lived an old sailor called Frode as well as 53 other people who did not have names and they referred to themselves as the numbers on playing cards (52 cards plus a Joker). The Ace of Hearts was particularly enchanting and Frode had quite a crush on her even though she was forever "losing herself".