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The Winner Stands Alone

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The Winner Stands Alone

Written by: Paulo Coelho
Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
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About this listen

The beloved, best-selling 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 12th 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.

©2008 Paulo Coelho (P)2009 HarperCollins Publishers
Literary Fiction Other Religions, Practices & Sacred Texts Personal Success Thriller & Suspense Fiction Celebrity Suspense
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Impressively bad

While the narration and the translation are good, the book itself is very bad. The story is not that interesting in the first place and made worse by getting watered down by the author going on tangents to rant about random things. This is evident from early on where the author takes a good chunk of a chapter to rant about how people are always on their phones these days.
All the characters have the same world view as the author with very little variation. The conversations are mostly just monologues and don't flow well at all.
The characterization felt very lazy. There are very little details and riddled with clichés. I genuinely think the author wrote that book in one sitting on a flight where he had no access to the internet to do even the smallest bit of research and never looked back. I'm confident I've reviewed this review before submitting more than the author reviewed the book before publishing.

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