Paulo Coelho Books Ranked: 12 Sorted by Story vs Message

Veronika, twenty four, in Ljubljana, takes an overdose because her life is perfectly fine and that is the problem. She wakes up in Villete, a psychiatric hospital, and is told her heart is damaged and she has about a week. The novel is that week. Coelho was put into psychiatric institutions by his parents as a young man, more than once, and he has written about it openly, so the ward here is populated by people with grudges and jokes and small daily tactics rather than symbols. It is the only book of his where the setting refuses to behave like a parable.

The setup is a fable and the book never pretends otherwise. Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd, dreams twice of treasure at the pyramids and sells his flock to go and find it. On the road: a king, a crystal merchant, a caravan, a long stretch in the desert, and an alchemist who talks. The English most Indian readers hold is Alan R. Clarke's translation, and the sentences are deliberately plain enough for a school student to finish the whole thing in two sittings. What it does brilliantly is momentum. What it does not do is surprise you even once.

Viscos is a mountain village of a couple of hundred people, most of them old and all of them broke. A stranger arrives, shows a young woman named Chantal Prym where he has buried a fortune in gold bars, and puts a proposition to the village with a deadline on it. From there the book does the one thing it needs to do, which is watch. Neighbours who have known each other for fifty years quietly start doing arithmetic. It is the tightest thing Coelho has written and it moves like a small cold thriller.

Maria leaves a small town in Brazil for a dancing job in Switzerland and ends up working in a club instead. The title is her own estimate of how long sex actually takes once you subtract everything wrapped around it. Coelho runs her diary entries alongside the narration and the diary is the good half: unsentimental, flatly funny, arguing with itself about whether pleasure and love have anything to do with each other. The sex is explicit, and there is a strand about pain and consent that most readers do not see coming from the author of The Alchemist.

Coelho takes a handful of lines from the Book of Kings and builds a novel in the gap between them. Elijah, hunted out of Israel, hides in a Phoenician town with a widow and her son, learns carpentry, becomes useful, falls in love, and loses every bit of it when a war arrives. The interesting half is not the prophecy. It is the rebuilding: what a person actually does on the morning after the disaster, one brick at a time, with no sign from anybody that it is worth doing.

Athena is dead when the book opens and the entire novel is other people talking about her: the former husband, the priest, the landlord, the journalist, the mother who adopted her. Coelho never gives you her own voice directly, which is the smartest structural decision he has ever made. Each witness contradicts the last, so you assemble a woman out of grudges and affection and gaps. The material on dance, calligraphy and ecstatic ritual will either take hold of you or send you checking how many pages are left.

His first book, and the one where the whole later career is visible in rough form. He walks the road to Santiago with a guide who sets him tasks, does breathing work and rituals between towns, meets a dog, argues, gets blisters, gets tired. Half of it is a travel diary of the Camino that holds up perfectly well as a travel diary. The other half is a manual, complete with numbered instructions you are meant to attempt yourself. It is rougher than everything that came after and more honest about the man doing the walking.

This is Coelho in his early twenties on the overland trail, written mostly in the third person about a character called Paulo. Dam Square, Istanbul, and then the long ride east. The travel is the pleasure here: cheap rooms, border officials, buses that break down, a Dutch woman called Karla who is written with more edge than most of his female characters, and a generation deciding that the answer must be somewhere in Asia. Indian readers get the odd experience of watching their own country arrive as somebody else's destination.

The narrator is a successful author in Paris whose wife, a war correspondent, disappears. That premise could carry a very good novel. What arrives instead is a long circular meditation on obsession, freedom and the stories couples tell about their own marriages, with a trip to Kazakhstan arriving late. The wife stays offstage as an idea rather than a person, which is either the point or the flaw depending on your mood. When the thinking is good it is properly good, especially on how two people build a shared story and then get trapped inside it.

Pilar is studying in Zaragoza, tired and shut down, when a man she loved as a child gets back in touch. He is now a seminarian, apparently able to heal, and being courted by his order for it. They travel through the Pyrenees for a week and argue about whether he can have both a calling and her. The feminine face of God is the book's actual subject and the romance is the vehicle. It is a slight vehicle, but the arguments between those two are sharper than any summary makes them sound.

Brida, twenty one, in Dublin, goes looking for magic and finds a hermit living in a forest and a woman who teaches what the book calls the tradition of the moon. There is a night alone in the woods early on that is the best scene Coelho has ever put on a page, genuinely frightening and completely wordless. After that the book settles into apprenticeship: lessons, symbols, past lives, and the idea that everyone has a soulmate you can identify by a light above the shoulder.

The frame is a manuscript supposedly discovered in Egypt, in which a Greek known as the Copt spends a single night in Jerusalem answering whatever the crowd asks him. Someone asks about defeat, someone else about solitude, then sex, then elegance, then beauty, and he answers each one in turn. That is the whole book, roughly a hundred and thirty pages of answers with an army outside the walls. There is no plot to spoil because there is no plot, and Coelho is not hiding that from anybody.