Igor, who is trying to shock her back into reality, that allows Veronika to reacquire the will to live and love. It is her supposed death sentence from the devious Dr. In a sedative-induced haze, Veronika finds companionship in white-haired Mari, who suffers from panic attacks, and Eduard, an ambassador's son who has been diagnosed as schizophrenic, and she begins to question the definition of insanity. At this point, Coelho takes a role in the novel he describes the circumstances under which he discovered Veronika's story and then recounts his own youthful incarceration in a Brazilian sanatorium, consigned there by parents who couldn't understand his ''unusual behavior.'' As quickly as he drops in, however, he drops out again, relying on interior monologues to set scenes. When Veronika awakens in the purgatory of Villete, the country's famous lunatic asylum, she is told her suicide attempt weakened her heart and she has only days to live. Veronika, 24, works in a library in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and rents a room in a convent she is an attractive woman with friends and family, but feelings of powerlessness and apathy tempt her to find ''freedom'' in an overdose of sleeping pills.

The bestselling Brazilian author of The Alchemist delicately etches this morose but ultimately uplifting story of the suicidal Veronika, who creeps along the boundary between life and death, sanity and madness, happiness and despair.

Veronika decides to die book buy