The Zahir

The Zahir is a novel by the Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho, published in 2005 and translated into more than forty languages.

The title is an Arabic word for something obvious or conspicuous, and the book uses it to describe the idea that a person's attention can be taken by one thing until nothing else exists. Coelho's narrator is a version of himself, and the story has strong autobiographical features, which has been one of the points of argument about it: readers who dislike the book say the search around which it is built is a form of self-regard. The journey takes the narrator from Paris to central Asia, and the structure — a successful man forced to reconsider his marriage by the disappearance of the woman he thought he understood — will be familiar to readers of The Alchemist, since both books are built as pilgrimages towards a change of mind. Coelho named the British war correspondent Christina Lamb as the model for Esther, and the novel had an unusual first publication: it appeared in Persian translation in Iran, where it was later banned, and the story of that edition is one of several about the reception of his work rather than the book itself.