Eleven Minutes by Paulo Coelho

Eleven Minutes is a fascinating story about Maria, a young woman from a small Brazilian village that gets heartbroken at a tender age. She becomes convinced that true love doesn't exist, that "love is a terrible thing that will make you suffer . . .".

After a chance meeting in Rio with a mysterious European man she decides to leave Brazil for Geneva, for what she hopes will be a fresh start with new possibilities in life. But life is sometimes like a big maze, it's difficult to find what you're looking for - and maybe you don't know exactly what it is that you're hoping to find...

I had a hard time to stop reading it once I had started. Finished it on the Similan liveaboard boat just before the trip was over. It's definitely one of Coelho's better stories.

The Devil and Miss Prym by Paulo Coelho

No, no, no, ...

I guess most authors are being pushed, either by their inner selfs and greed or by a publisher's dream of more gold at the end of a plausible second rainbow, to mechanically generate a number of stories that can be released onto the market while it's hot, after coming up with a bestseller like The Alchemist.

It's unfortunate that a good story by itself in many cases lacks the possibility to generate any revenue worth mentioning in book shops. Instead, it seems to be the author's name that's the most valuable asset in the book business nowadays. It's the author that sells, not the story in the book.

The Devil and Miss Prym, which I got just to have something to read on the beach, seems to be just like one of those stories, gaining a crowd (yes, I admit that I got it myself since I had read a few of Coelho's previous creations) only because of its author's popularity. It's definitely not one of Coelho's greater ones, I got through it quite fast since nothing really stood out.