Paulo Coelho

Paulo Coelho was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1947 and attended a Jesuit school. At 17 his parents had him committed to a mental institution, from which he escaped three times before being released at 20. He later lived as a hippie, travelling through South America, North Africa, Mexico and Europe, and after returning to Brazil wrote song lyrics for Elis Regina, Rita Lee and Raul Seixas.

In 1986 he walked the Camino de Santiago in northwestern Spain and wrote about it in The Pilgrimage (1987). He wrote The Alchemist the following year. Its small Brazilian publisher printed 900 copies and declined to reprint; the book took off only after he moved to a larger house and published Brida. The Alchemist became an international bestseller, and his work has since been published in more than 170 countries and translated into 83 languages. He has been a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters since 2002. His books are short and plainly told, built around spiritual searches. He has named the Sufi tradition as an influence on The Alchemist and The Zahir, and four of his books (The Pilgrimage, Hippie, The Valkyries and Aleph) are autobiographical.

Start with The Alchemist. It is short, it is the book his reputation rests on, and the story of Santiago, a young shepherd, holds the ideas the rest of his work keeps returning to. Treat it as a test: his other books share its direct, fable-like voice, so a reader who finds The Alchemist too simple is unlikely to be won over by the later ones.

If it does work for you, read The Pilgrimage next. It is his account of the 1986 Camino walk that came just before The Alchemist, and it shows where the later book's ideas came from. After that, try a novel with a more adult setting: Eleven Minutes (2003) follows a young Brazilian woman working as a prostitute and her path toward self-realization, and The Zahir (2005), a novel about love, loss and obsession, is built, like The Alchemist, around a pilgrimage.