The Shadow of the Wind

Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind, first published in Spanish in 2001 and translated into English in 2004, is one of the great literary mysteries of the twenty-first century. Postwar Barcelona is a city of shuttered shops, secret police, and old family wounds. Ten-year-old Daniel Sempere, son of an antiquarian bookseller, is taken at dawn to a place known as the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, where every reader chooses a single volume to protect for the rest of their life. Daniel's choice is a novel called The Shadow of the Wind by Julian Carax, an author almost no one remembers. As Daniel grows up, he discovers that someone has spent years systematically tracking down and burning every other copy of Carax's work, and that the trail of that mysterious figure runs through the broken lives of the people Carax once loved. Zafon braids gothic atmosphere, a tortured love story, the long shadow of the Spanish Civil War, and a love letter to reading itself into a single propulsive narrative. Streets fog, characters are mistaken for one another, secrets surface decades late. Translated lovingly by Lucia Graves, the novel became an international phenomenon and the founding volume of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books quartet.