Veronika Decides to Die
by Paulo Coelho

List Price: $24.00
Pages: 224
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 0060196122
Publisher: HarperCollins

Paulo Coelho was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the city where he now lives. His own life has in many ways been as varied and unusual as the protagonists of his internationally acclaimed novels, for like them he has followed a dream in a quest for fulfillment. His own dream, to be a writer, met with frustration throughout much of his early adult life, a time in which he worked at various professions, some of them materially quite rewarding but spiritually unfulfilling. "I always knew," he says, "that my Personal Legend, to use a term from alchemy, was to write." He was 38 when he published his first book.

In 1970, after deciding that law school was not for him, he traveled through much of South America, North Africa, Mexico, and Europe. Returning to Brazil after two years, he began a successful career as a popular songwriter. In 1974 he was imprisoned for a short time by the military dictatorship then ruling Brazil. In 1980 he experienced one of the defining moments of his life: he walked the 500-plus mile Road of Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain. On this ancient highway, used for centuries by pilgrims from France to get to the cathedral said to house the remains of St. James, he achieved a self-awareness and a spiritual awakening that he later described in The Pilgrimage: A Contemporary Quest for Ancient Wisdom. As he puts it, "There came a moment, after traveling the Road to Santiago, that I said, 'Now I will face my reality.'"

In 1988 he published The Alchemist, a work that launched him as an author internationally recognized for his powerful storytelling technique and the profound spiritual insights he blends seamlessly into his parables. The Alchemist has sold more than two million copies in Brazil alone and has been translated into some 34 languages. More than 17 million copies of his works have been sold worldwide, and he is the most widely read Latin American writer after Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

He was the featured author at the 1997 Frankfurt Book Fair and has received literary prizes in France and other European countries. But numerous awards and kudos from critics have not changed his simple lifestyle. For example, every day at 6 PM he interrupts his activities and retires for a short prayer. Nor has his fame and popularity altered his fundamental sense of perspective: "I try to share with my readers my inner quest," he has said. "That is basically my spiritual quest. I don't have anything to teach, but I do have something to share." Readers in every continent of the world would contend that Paulo Coelho has much to teach, and they will find in The Fifth Mountain the same subtle inner truth, allegorical beauty, and personal inspiration that they earlier discovered in The Alchemist.

top of the page