Books Written by Eckhart Tolle

The Power of Now (1997). It contains the complete framework, it was written first, and every other book he has published is either a companion to it or an expansion of it. Read A New Earth (2005) second. If The Power of Now feels too abstract, Guardians of Being — the illustrated collaboration with Patrick McDonnell — carries the same core ideas in a much gentler form and takes an afternoon.

Seven books, published between 1997 and 2009: The Power of Now (1997), Practicing the Power of Now (2001), Stillness Speaks (2003), A New Earth (2005), Milton's Secret (2008, with Robert S. Friedman), Oneness with All Life (2008, selections from A New Earth) and Guardians of Being (2009, with Patrick McDonnell). Only two are major original works — The Power of Now and A New Earth. You will see other totals quoted because some lists drop the excerpt volume and the illustrated collaborations, and others add his audio and video programmes.

Six more. The important one is A New Earth (2005), his only other full-length original work. Practicing the Power of Now (2001) collects the exercises from The Power of Now; Stillness Speaks (2003) is a book of aphorisms; Oneness with All Life (2008) is a selection of passages from A New Earth; and Milton's Secret (2008) and Guardians of Being (2009) are illustrated collaborations. If you only read one more, read A New Earth.

The Power of Now is about the individual: how one person can stop generating their own suffering by recognising the ego's identification with the thinking mind and returning attention to the present. A New Earth takes the same diagnosis and applies it collectively, treating the ego as a shared human condition and arguing that a change in collective consciousness is necessary rather than optional. The first is more personal and more practical; the second is more philosophical and more ambitious. Read The Power of Now first.

The Power of Now, published in 1997. It has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide and been translated into 69 languages, and it is the book people mean when they refer to his work. A New Earth came close after Oprah Winfrey selected it for her book club in January 2008 — and again in January 2025, making it the only title ever chosen twice — but The Power of Now remains the defining one.

Start with The Power of Now (1997), then A New Earth (2005). Those two are the only major original works and together they contain the whole teaching. After them the order stops mattering: Practicing the Power of Now (2001) and Stillness Speaks (2003) are companion volumes for living with the material rather than sequels, and Guardians of Being (2009) and Milton's Secret (2008) are illustrated books you can pick up at any point. Note that publication order and reading order differ here, because the companions came out before the second major book.

No, although it draws on Zen Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, Sufism and Christian mysticism. Tolle presents his teaching as something anyone can verify directly, whatever they believe. He does not ask readers to adopt a faith, join a tradition or follow a teacher — he asks them to notice something about their own awareness that is already there. Readers from secular backgrounds tend to find the work accessible for exactly that reason, and readers from religious backgrounds generally find it compatible with what they already practise.

He was born Ulrich Leonard Tölle in Lünen, Germany, on 16 February 1948. He adopted the first name Eckhart later in life, reportedly in tribute to the medieval German philosopher and mystic Meister Eckhart, whose writing on presence and the nature of the self closely parallels his own.

In 1977, at twenty-nine, after a long period of depression and shortly after abandoning a postgraduate research place at Cambridge, he experienced what he describes as a sudden and complete separation from his own thinking. He spent roughly the next two years sitting on the benches of Russell Square in central London, largely without possessions or plans, before he began teaching. The Power of Now, published twenty years later, is his account of what that changed.

“ECK-hart TOLL-uh”. The surname has two syllables and rhymes roughly with “holla”, reflecting the German origin of both names. Tolle has addressed the pronunciation himself in interviews, since it is commonly said as one syllable in English.

Eckhart Tolle, with a “ck” in the first name and two l's in the surname. He was born Ulrich Leonard Tölle in Germany in 1948 and took the first name Eckhart later, after the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart. Common misspellings are Eckart Tolle, Ekhart Tolle and Echart Tolle.

Eckhart Tolle is a German-born spiritual teacher and author, born in Lünen in 1948 and resident in Vancouver, Canada. He is best known for The Power of Now (1997) and A New Earth (2005), and he teaches that most psychological suffering is produced by identification with the thinking mind rather than by circumstance. He has written seven books in total.