The Alchemist.

The Alchemist follows Santiago, a young Andalusian shepherd who dreams of treasure buried at the Egyptian pyramids and sets out across North Africa in search of it, learning along the way to read the omens of the world and to pursue what the book calls his Personal Legend. First published in Brazil as O Alquimista in 1988, the novel sold modestly at first before finding an international readership that made it one of the great publishing phenomena of the modern age, translated into more than eighty languages and selling tens of millions of copies around the world. Paulo Coelho (b. 1947) came to fiction late, after a turbulent youth in Rio de Janeiro, a period of confinement in a psychiatric institution, and years spent writing lyrics for Brazilian rock musicians. His pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago in 1986 turned him toward the themes of vocation, destiny, and spiritual searching that run through his work, and the simple fable of following one’s dreams that he made of them has become among the most widely read and most frequently gifted novels of the past half century.