Veronika Decides to Die
Veronika Decides to Die is Paulo Coelho's 1998 novel, the second in his loose On the Seventh Day trilogy after By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept. Veronika is twenty-four, attractive, employed at a small Ljubljana library, and so bored by the prospect of her own future that she takes four bottles of sleeping pills in her boarding-house bedroom one November afternoon. She does not die. She wakes up in Villete, a private mental hospital outside the Slovenian capital, and is told that the overdose has irreparably damaged her heart, and that she has perhaps five days left. The novel that follows is set almost entirely inside Villete, where Veronika moves among the patients she had been raised to fear, including a former lawyer who has chosen psychiatric retirement, a young schizophrenic, and a woman tortured by panic attacks. Coelho draws on his own three involuntary commitments as a Brazilian teenager.
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What you might want to know about Veronika Decides to Die
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Twenty-four-year-old Ljubljana librarian Veronika has a small apartment, a steady job, and a few dates a week, and on a November morning in 1997 she swallows four packets of sleeping pills.
Paulo Coelho has said it draws on his own experiences as a young man, when his parents committed him to a psychiatric hospital. The novel is fictionalized.
It deals seriously with suicide and mental illness, but the arc is ultimately about the rediscovery of meaning. It is not a dark or hopeless read.
Veronika Decides to Die was written by Paulo Coelho, published in 2006 by HarperCollins Publishers.
Veronika Decides to Die is a standalone novel by Paulo Coelho, not part of a series.
Veronika Decides to Die is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.