It has to be said that The Alchemist is not a book for everyone. Some I’m sure will think it’s utter poppycock. It’s just a novel after all and yet many hundreds of people live their lives by its message. And I am one of them.

Paulo Coelho’s most-loved title is one of my treasured possessions. It was given to me many years ago by a person with a truly beautiful personality; September 12, 2002 to be exact.

Through a combination of house moves, new jobs, and being in very different places with our lives she is no longer in mine, well, not properly anyway. But I have always believed that special people come to you at certain points in your life and, although they might not stay forever, you carry a bit of them with you always; a notion The Alchemist echoes.

I miss her because she is wise, and funny, and kind. Because when my dad died she wrote me a letter that spun straight to my broken heart. Even though she doesn’t yet know that pain of losing your father she got it in a single sentence.

I miss her because she made me run through enormous puddles when we got caught in a thunderstorm on our way to a night out, and then she laughed when we had to spend the evening with panda eyes because the rain had smudged our mascara.

I miss her because she tucked me up in her spare bed one night when I was wracked with insomnia and I woke hours later to a hot cup of tea and the smell of a bathtub rammed with expensive Penhaligon’s bubbles.

And I will always think fondly of her for giving me her own copy of a book she loved at a time when I didn’t even know I needed it.

She told me that tradition dictated The Alchemist should be read then passed on to someone in need and that’s what I should do. I have bought copies for other people but if you’re reading this, darling, I’m sorry but I still have the one you gave me and I will still have it when I’m old and grey.

I can’t tell you that much about the story. I’m one of those people who shuts the back cover and can’t quite remember what the plot was by the following day. What I remember is some little nugget that struck a chord or how it made me feel.

And The Alchemist made me feel like I understood life just a tiny bit better. It made me feel like any time I was faced with a difficult decision I simply had to look for a sign and I would know the way.

One day, standing in the shower with my mind unusually quiet, the words: “It’s time to go,” came in to my head and the decision that had rattled around in my brain for weeks, the one she hoped the book would help me make, was done.

Before this book my brain would have doubted the veracity of those words and set off on the never-ending cycle of ‘what ifs’ again. After it I became more aware of listening to my heart.

And so I scribbled out my resignation and handed it in that very day, packed up, and headed off to new horizons. I left behind all the emotional chaff that was bringing me down and swapped my wardrobe full of dull, practical suits for clothes that made me feel happy. The new job I had thought was dead and buried suddenly became mine and everything started to fall in to place in a year that was perhaps the most seminal one of my life.

The intervening years have had some deliciously happy days but in times when life has not been smooth looking for the signs the way the shepherd boy Santiago did on his journey across deserts and mountains has helped.

This book, though it will pain her greatly to know it, is part of the reason I don’t have children. One day I realised I was studiously ignoring sign after sign that it wasn’t meant to be, a veritable Las Vegas strip of great big neon pointers in fact, and I admitted defeat.

But its thinking is also quite possibly the reason I saw my dad just the week before he died after suddenly feeling like I should take a diversion on my way home from a few days away. We had what turned out to be one last lovely lunch in the sunshine at one of dad’s favourite places. I can’t remember saying goodbye but I know without a shadow of doubt that I would have hugged him and told him I loved him.

There are countless times when I have struggled to come to a decision or deal with inner turmoil and suddenly something has happened to make me know exactly what to do.

Just this week, as I have bickered relentlessly on the phone with someone I love I repeatedly pulled the same card out of my pack of inspirational quotes from the Dalai Lama, a card about using differences in a positive way. Angrily I shuffled and shuffled until I pulled out another about compassion healing inner anger. Today I tried one last time and pulled out ‘Be a nice person’. I laughed and randomly, on my way back from the loo, took out a book I haven’t looked at for years, 16 Guidelines For A Happy Life. I opened it up on a step-by-step exercise about having patience when dealing with someone you are finding difficult. Okay, okay, I get the message.

Yes, you might think it is all a load of bunkum. But really, for me, The Alchemist is just about listening to your heart, taking a little guidance when it is offered, letting something bigger than you decide your fate, falling backwards and expecting a soft landing.

I opened my copy just now and came upon these words.

“Why should I listen to my heart?”

“Because you will never again be able to keep it quiet. Even if you pretend not to have heard what it tells you, it will always be there inside you, repeating to you what you’re thinking about life and about the world.”

So to the gorgeous girl up there hundreds of miles away but always somewhere in my heart, thank you. This one is for you x

Several years ago I decided to get rid of the vast majority of our bookshelves. My dreams of having a personal library complete with a ladder that moved round the shelves were clearly never going to be realised and I was tired of my tiny flat being stuffed with rows and rows of books that collected dust. And so the great clear out began. Five huge shelves would be replaced with one shiny new one which would have space for 50 tomes max – everything else had to go.

As a person who treasures books and defines their life by them it was no mean feat. But, as depressing as it was, I didn’t want to be bogged down with novels I would never read again, even more so the ones that I had never completed or even got past the first par with.

Bouyed by an interview I did with Nick Hornby I clung to what he told me: “If a book is killing you, for God’s sake put it down.”

I promised Mr Hornby that I would get rid of one such book that very weekend. And so the dog-eared copy of the Lord of the Rings that had stared out accusingly at me in every house I had lived in for more than 20 years was first in the charity box, complete with the bookmark I had left somewhere about two thirds of the way through. I was free. No longer the person who had spectacularly failed to finish it in two decades but now a person who just didn’t enjoy it that much.

That, however, was the only one I felt joyful about.

The duplicates were not too hard. As fellow journalists my husband and me had several of the same titles – mine were in better condition so it was largely mine that stayed. As it wasn’t my books that were going that was a good section to get in the swing with.

Then came the old novels that hadn’t had that much impact on my life. The funny gift books went. The collections that showed my temporary fascination with one particular subject were significantly thinned; the factual and fiction books on the Mafia that sat next to dozens of books on Buddhism were pared down to a few titles (though the Buddhism books fared significantly better, you’ll be pleased to hear).

A few of those that the whole world has raved about were next – yep, it is true that my copy of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and One Day were picked up and put down more times than I care to remember. I failed where a million others had succeeded. But I let the guilt go. Hell, I have never been a follower whether it was about politics, ra-ra skirts, or cult films, indeed I brazenly declared decades ago that I found all-bar-one Shakespeare tale turgid so why was I holding on to all these books that people told me I must enjoy? Someone else undoubtedly would, and they’d get them for the bargain price of 50 pence.

Really old books that had been bought from dusty second-hand bookshops as souvenirs of lovely days out were toughies. I was pained by the thought that they might never be loved again. An Oscar Wilde and a book about Cary Grant with a brilliant intro stayed, the others went.

And though I have on occasion mourned its loss, a prized Roald Dahl was given to a little girl I love, one whose mother I had repeatedly read the long-lost original copy with. It has since been replaced by more of the wondercrump’s witterings which made me laugh when I couldn’t focus on ‘real’ books.

In amongst the madness was the decision to keep all three copies of a Jay McInerney book that is considered to be my favourite because of its place in my reading history – each one is precious in its own way, though none is the original that I lent out and never got back.

By the end of a process that took many weeks of sorting and re-sorting we were left with one uber-tidy shelf of our very finest. Well, apart from the suitcase on top of the wardrobe and the box under the bed of ones we haven’t quite parted with yet.

And now, several years down the line, that bookcase that originally looked like something from the pages of a stylish magazine has novels laying awkwardly on top of the carefully aligned titles, big piles of books hidden behind the neat rows, and even a few balanced next to the ornaments that were chosen to break up the display.

One day, one day, I will sort them out again and pare it all back to those titles that I really treasure but for now I have to admit, I’m a bookish kinda girl.

* Hang fire for blogs about some of my favourite titles and what they mean to me.