14 Books Like The Alchemist, Ranked by How Much They Preach

Siddhartha is born into the priestly class in ancient India, is good at everything expected of him, and leaves anyway. He tries starving himself with the ascetics, meets the Buddha and politely declines to follow him, then goes the other way completely into money, a lover, rich food, boredom and self disgust. The last third is a ferryman and a river. Hesse wrote it in the early 1920s after his own collapse, and you can feel a man working something out rather than a teacher setting homework. It is short, the sentences are plain, and the wisdom stays inside the story where you have to go and fetch it yourself.

A pilot goes down in the desert with a broken engine and eight days of water, and a child appears out of nowhere asking him to draw a sheep. What follows is the boy's account of the tiny planets he stopped at on the way here, each one run by a grown up locked inside a single habit, including a king with nobody to rule and a businessman counting stars he claims to own. Then comes the fox, and the rose, and a goodbye that hits harder than a book with pictures in it has any right to. Saint-Exupery flew mail planes over the Sahara before he wrote this, and the desert in it is a real desert.

Santiago has gone eighty four days without a fish and the village has quietly written him off. He rows out further than anyone sensible would, hooks a marlin longer than his boat, and the two of them hold on to each other for days while the line opens his hands. That is the entire plot. What makes it strange is how holy the thing feels while staying completely physical: salt, cramp, raw tuna eaten for strength, a boy waiting on the shore. Hemingway says nothing anywhere in it about what any of this means, which is exactly why people have been finding meaning in it for seventy years.

Frankl was a Viennese psychiatrist who spent the war inside concentration camps, Auschwitz among them, and lost almost his entire family. The first half is what he observed there: who broke, who did not, and why men who could still find a reason to get up outlasted stronger men who could not. The second half is a plain account of logotherapy, the practice he built around meaning rather than pleasure or power. It appeared in German in 1946 and in English more than a decade later. The prose is flat and completely unsentimental, which is what makes the first half impossible to put down.

A young writer inherits a lignite mine on Crete and hires Alexis Zorba, an old labourer who plays the santuri, cooks, seduces, brawls and refuses to plan anything at all. The mine is a disaster from about the second week. The book is really the argument between the two of them: the man who reads about life set against the man who keeps walking straight into it. Kazantzakis writes Zorba as a weather system rather than a character, and the narrator as the version of ourselves we are embarrassed by. It is funnier than its reputation suggests and much harder at the end than you expect.

Piscine Patel grows up in Pondicherry among his father's animals and, being a thorough boy, practises Hinduism, Christianity and Islam at the same time without seeing a problem. The family sells the zoo and sails for Canada. The ship goes down. Most of the book after that is a lifeboat, a tiger called Richard Parker, and survival worked out in such practical detail that you stop noticing how impossible it all is. Then the last twenty pages arrive and quietly turn the whole thing over. Martel is not selling belief here. He is showing you what it costs and what it does for you.

A prophet named Almustafa has lived twelve years in a foreign city and his ship has finally come for him. Before he boards, the people gather and ask him to speak, and he answers on marriage, children, giving, work, joy and sorrow, and around twenty other subjects. That is the whole structure. Gibran was a Lebanese American writer and painter, and the book reads like scripture written by somebody who loved scripture but wanted no religion attached to it. There is no plot and no argument in it, only cadence. You either fall into that rhythm by page three or you never do.

Veronika has a decent job, a decent flat and no particular reason to continue, so she takes an overdose. She survives, and comes round in Villete, a psychiatric hospital, where a doctor informs her the attempt wrecked her heart and she has days to live. The rest is what she does with that week among people the outside world has filed away as mad. Coelho was committed to psychiatric institutions by his parents as a young man, and the anger in this book about who gets called crazy is clearly first hand. It is his sharpest novel and by some distance his least comfortable.

Nora Seed's life has narrowed down to almost nothing: cat gone, job gone, brother not speaking to her. She decides to end it and wakes in a library that sits between life and death, where a librarian starts handing her the lives she did not choose. She tries an Olympic swimming career, a rock star version, a stretch as a glaciologist, and discovers each one is a whole real life with its own bad Tuesdays rather than a fantasy. Haig writes clean fast modern sentences and has been open about his own depression, which shows in how carefully he handles Nora on her worst day.

Jonathan is a gull bored by scavenging who becomes obsessed with flight itself: speed, dives, control right at the edge of what a bird can survive. The flock calls this irresponsible and casts him out. He keeps practising alone, meets gulls who have gone much further, and the book climbs from a story about mastery into something closer to a religious parable about souls and teachers. It is very short, printed with black and white photographs of gulls in most editions, and it was absolutely everywhere in the seventies. The first half is a great deal better than the second.

This is the book Coelho wrote just before The Alchemist, and it is far closer to a memoir than a fable. He walks the old pilgrim road across northern Spain with a guide named Petrus, fails a ritual at the very start, and spends the whole route doing practices he is instructed to do, including a breathing exercise, a cruelty exercise and a speed exercise performed at half pace. Some of it is straight occult nonsense and he does not apologise for any of it. What makes it worth the time is the walking itself, the blisters and villages and long boredom, all of it reported honestly.

Mitch Albom lost touch with Morrie Schwartz, his college sociology teacher, and found him again on television, dying of ALS. He started flying in every Tuesday with a tape recorder running, and the book is those conversations sorted by subject: family, money, regret, forgiveness, death. A real man, a real illness, a real last class, and Morrie turns out to be very good company on the page. It is also engineered to make you cry and the engineering works on nearly everyone. Albom is a professional at this, and how much that bothers you will decide how you feel about the book.

Hector Garcia and Francesc Miralles travelled to Ogimi in Okinawa, a village known for how long its residents live, and interviewed people in their nineties and beyond about food, routine, friendship and work. Around those interviews they assembled chapters on Japanese ideas of purpose, plus flow, plus some light gerontology and a set of exercises. It came out in Spanish in 2016 and reached English readers the year after, and it has been on airport tables ever since. The Ogimi reporting is the good part. Everything built around it is a competent summary of other people's research.

Julian Mantle is a courtroom star who collapses in front of a jury, sells the Ferrari and the mansion, and goes to India looking for sages. He comes back to tell a former colleague what he learned, and the rest of the book is that telling: a fable about a garden, a lighthouse, a sumo wrestler and a rose, where every object stands in for a habit you are meant to adopt. Sharma is a Canadian former lawyer, the book first appeared in the late nineties, and it has been on Indian railway bookstalls ever since. It is a seminar in narrative form.