The Winner Stands Alone

In The Winner Stands Alone, Paulo Coelho has returned to the important themes of Eleven Minutes and The Zahir: Love and Obsession. He offers a suspenseful novel about the fascinating worlds of fortune and celebrity, where the commitment to luxury and success at any cost often prevents one from hearing what the heart actually desires.

Coelho takes us to the Cannes Film Festival, where the so-called Superclass gathers——those who have made it in the dreammaker’s world of fashion and cinema. Some of them have even reached the very top and are afraid to lose their lofty positions. Money, power, and fame are at stake——things for which most people are prepared to do anything to keep.

At this modern vanity fair we meet Igor, a Russian millionaire; Middle Eastern fashion czar Hamid; American actress Gabriela, eager to land a lead role; ambitious criminal detective Savoy, hoping to resolve the case of his life; and Jasmine, a woman on the brink of a successful modeling career.

Who will succeed in identifying his or her own personal dream among the many prefabricated ones——and succeed in making it come true?

The beloved, bestselling international author of The Alchemist returns with another haunting novel—a thrilling journey into our constant fascination with the worlds of fame, fortune, and celebrity.

A profound meditation on personal power and innocent dreams that are manipulated or undone by success, The Winner Stands Alone is set in the exciting worlds of fashion and cinema. Taking place over the course of twenty-four hours during the Cannes Film Festival, it is the story of Igor, a successful, driven Russian entrepreneur who will go to the darkest lengths to reclaim a lost love—his ex-wife, Ewa. Believing that his life with Ewa was divinely ordained, Igor once told her that he would destroy whole worlds to get her back. The conflict between an individual evil force and society emerges, and as the novel unfolds, morality is derailed.

Meet the players and poseurs behind the scenes at Cannes—the "Superclass" of producers, actors, designers, and supermodels, as well as the aspiring starlets, has-been stars, and jaded hangers-on. Adroitly interweaving the characters' stories, Paulo Coelho uses his twelfth novel to paint an engrossing picture of a world overrun by glamour and excess, and shows us the possibly dire consequences of our obsession with fame.

Publishers Weekly

Coelho's latest blends spiritual allegory with elements of a thriller and does not lend itself to an easy audio production. Paul Boehmer singlehandedly tackles a cast of characters with a wide spectrum of languages and ethnic identities. The action surrounds 24 fateful hours at the Cannes Film Festival, as Igor kills off members of an elite “superclass” in a sociopathic rage against his ex-wife, Ewa. Boehmer provides a carefully constructed accent and speech pattern to his portrayal of Igor, and delivers an equally impressive turn as Ewa's current spouse, a Middle Eastern fashion mogul. Yet other principal figures in the story—particularly the female characters—do not receive the same attention to vocal detail; consequently, the dialogue exchanges sound uneven. A Harper hardcover (Reviews, Feb. 9). (Apr.)

Brazilian author Paulo Coelho broke sacred ground -- and crossed over into worldwide fame as an author -- with his symbolic masterpiece, The Alchemist. Since then, Coelho has dedicated his work to the ideal of helping people to follow their wildest dreams.