The Alchemist.

First published in Portuguese in 1988 as O Alquimista and translated into English in 1993, Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist has become one of the most widely read novels of the modern era, translated into more than eighty languages and selling tens of millions of copies worldwide. Coelho wrote the book in only two weeks in 1987, later explaining that he was able to compose at such a pace because the story was already written in his soul. Its main theme is the finding of one's destiny. It tells the magical story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who yearns to travel in search of a worldly treasure as extravagant as any ever found, and who journeys from his home in Spain to the markets of Tangier and across the Egyptian desert to a fateful encounter with the alchemist. Along the way he meets a procession of teachers - a mysterious old king who speaks of one's Personal Legend, a crystal merchant marooned by his own caution, an Englishman pursuing the secrets of alchemy, and the desert woman Fatima whom he comes to love - each of whom carries him closer to the wisdom the journey is meant to confer. The story of the treasures Santiago finds along the way teaches us, as only a few stories have done, about the essential wisdom of listening to our hearts, learning to read the omens strewn along life's path, and, above all, following our dreams. Every few decades a book is published that changes the lives of its readers forever; drawing on the mystical traditions of Sufism, Christian symbolism, and the literature of pilgrimage, The Alchemist is unmistakably one of them.