The Witch of Portobello /

The Witch of Portobello is a fiction work by Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho published in 2007, about a woman born in Transylvania to a Romani mother, who is orphaned and later adopted by a wealthy Lebanese couple. It starts with the death of the main character, Athena and is told from the points of view of the people who knew her – her adoptive mother, her ex-husband, a journalist researching vampires, a priest, her landlord, a teacher of calligraphy, a historian and an actress. They each provide a different view of her, describing not only what they saw and experienced but adding their own impressions, interpreting her through their own beliefs and fears. In this book, Coelho works with the return to the goddess religion, the interpretation of love, and the feminine part of the Divine within the theme of searching for one’s true self and opening to the energies of the world. He also alludes via a series of covert motifs to current issues, such as crime, sects, debates against Christianity and Catholicism, and even dieting, where the original themes coalesce to form the story of a woman "of the twenty-second century living in the twenty-first".