Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist

ONCE UPON A TIME……………...As children, when those magical words are spoken to us, we begin to REMEMBER and unknowingly reconnect with the truth about ourselves deep within our souls

*(For a summary of Coelho’s The Alchemist, go to the appendix at the end of this book.) This truth is that here on Earth each of us is a dream; a dream waiting to become a reality. Every child has some kind of unconscious sense of this mystery buried within his/her own heart. The fact is that, whether we know it or not, none of us can live without our own highly individual Once Upon a Time. ONCE UPON A TIME in 1987 a little-known Brazilian writer and dreamer called Paulo Coelho decided to honour his inner child, and so began to write his own personal fairy tale. It became the fable known to millions as THE ALCHEMIST. Paulo based his story on an ancient allegorical tale he had read in the centuries-old book The Arabian Nights.* Decades earlier, the famous Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, whom Coelho had read avidly as a young man, also found inspiration in the same story and created his own version called A TALE OF TWO DREAMERS. THE ALCHEMIST made its

Millions of people around the world are devoted and unconditional fans of the fable, and one unintended consequence of that overwhelming love for the story is that its author has unwittingly been cast in the role of a new-age ‘guru’ and spiritual sage. However, after twenty eight years in print, and with more than 65 million copies of THE ALCHEMIST sold - giving it an almost mythical status in world literature - over a period of nineteen long years I discovered that no one, and I suspect NOT EVEN PAULO COELHO HIMSELF, could understand or explain the extraordinary success and appeal of his