Maria, a young Brazilian woman, travels to Geneva dreaming of fame and fortune. Instead, she becomes a high-end prostitute, all while searching for — and philosophising about — the nature of love, desire, and the sacred in the profane.
Brida O'Fern is a young Irish woman driven by a hunger for spiritual knowledge. She seeks out two teachers — a wise man in the forest and a witch who teaches through the Wiccan Tradition of the Sun — in search of magic, purpose, and her soulmate.
A world-famous author — unmistakably Coelho himself — wakes one day to find that his war-correspondent wife Esther has disappeared, seemingly of her own will. His obsessive search for her, and for the meaning behind her departure, takes him from Paris to the steppes of Central Asia.