The Zahir: A Novel Of Obsession by Paulo Coelho

The Zahir: A Novel Of Obsession by Paulo Coelho

The narrator of The Zahir* is an international bestselling novelist who lives in France and enjoys all the privileges his money and celebrity bring. His wife of ten years is a journalist who has covered wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and despite her professional success and freedom from the conventional constraints of marriage is facing an existential crisis. When she disappears along with a friend, who may or may not be her lover, the authorities question the narrator.

The journey to find his wife takes the narrator from the glamorous sumptuousness of Paris to Kazakhstan, the former Soviet Republic and Mikhail's birthplace, a nation punctured by violence and political uncertainty but where the landscape is infused with unexpected spiritual energy. There, the narrator makes surprising discoveries about himself.

*According to the writer Jorge Luis Borges, the idea of the Zahir comes from the Islamic tradition. In Arabic it means visible, present, incapable of being unnoticed. It could be the person who occupies every psychic space of another person's life as an object of passion, obsession, and inspiration.

The life of PAULO COELHO continues to be the principal source of inspiration for his books. He's flirted with death, evaded crazy, dabbled with narcotics, endured torture, studied philosophy and religion, read voraciously, lost and rediscovered his faith, and experienced the pain and pleasure of love. He has discovered answers to the issues that everyone experiences while searching for his own place in the world. He believes that we all possess the essential strength to determine our own fate. Adultery, his most recent work, was a international bestseller.

His 1988 novel The Alchemist has sold over 65 million copies and has been hailed as an influence by Malala Yousafzai and Pharrell Williams, among others. Paulo Coelho's books have sold over 200 million copies worldwide. His work has been translated into 81 languages, making him the most widely read living author on the planet.