Jacques the Fatalist – Denis Diderot

That’s fatalism as in “we can’t affect our destiny” rather than “I’ve got a very bad feeling about this”.

I thoroughly enjoyed this philosophical debate disguised as a rambling novel in the digressive vein of Tristram Shandy. In fact, there are a few incidents that Diderot has lifted directly from Sterne’s masterpiece, which could be seen as dodgy if the voice of the “editor” didn’t later intervene to berate the “author” for this very act of plagiarism.