Like many great novels, the book you are about to read is one whose every page is imbued with the art of storytelling. Its first five words, ‘I still remember the day’, spoken by the narrator, Daniel Sempere, open the door to what will soon expand into a complex world of both mystery and realism, a world of destiny and curses, of love, sorrow and humour—and a world that is centred firmly in Barcelona, the city where Carlos Ruiz Zafón was born and grew up. The Shadow of the Wind has been described variously as gothic romance, political thriller and historical fiction: this is a book where genres and styles come together to create a homage to literature and to the magical experience of reading.

Set a few years after the end of the Spanish Civil War and spanning over a decade—although the timeline will stretch into the immediate past and beyond, as further tales are told by new voices—the novel draws us into a Barcelona ‘beneath ashen skies’, where an atmosphere of fear and threat is pervaded by the cruelty of Franco’s police state. Such dark descriptive details of Barcelona are Zafón’s own trade-mark—his is not the picture-postcard place for tourists to visit; rather it is a sombre, slightly sinister town often described as misty, with reefs of clouds and lightning, or icy winds. Daniel Sempere is only ten when his father, the owner of a small bookshop, takes him for the first time to a secret place in the heart of Barcelona, where he hopes the boy will be able to forget the loss of his mother for a while. In a narrow alleyway where ‘the brightness of dawn filtered down from balconies and cornices in streaks of slanting light’, they come to what seems to Daniel like the carcass of an old palace. The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, as it is known, is a huge, maze-like, ghostly depot of old volumes under a glass dome, a place whose extravagant architecture is as fanciful as the rest of the descriptions of Barcelona are authentic.

This is Zafón’s supreme creation, in which he brings together his imagination and ideas, and is somewhere he will return to repeatedly. For Daniel—and for the reader—the visit is an unforgettable experience. The bookseller’s son is allowed to wander through the eerie labyrinth formed by endless corridors of bookshelves, in search of a volume to take home and ‘adopt’. Before long, the chosen book will initiate the unravelling of a mystery, after a series of events connected to the novel’s author begin to irrupt into Daniel’s quiet life—posing unanswered questions that haunt him as he leaves his childhood behind. But Daniel will not rest until he understands the enigma that spreads and deepens around him, even more threatening in the political climate of the time. Memorable characters will appear, each as vivid and real as the city they live in, with Daniel’s companion and ally Fermín—a man of ‘anarchist-libertarian leanings’—alleviating some of the tale’s darkest moments with his irrepressible sense of humour. Indeed, the novel comes alive through the power and suppleness of its language, which colours the reality of a particular place and time, while bringing out the universal emotions of human experience.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón is a masterful conjuror, a literary architect whose structures match the heights of his fantasy and are held together by the bricks and mortar of his Barcelona, both the old medieval town with its hidden narrow lanes, its Ramblas and its port, and the new modernist city of Gaudí and the mansions lining Avenida del Tibidabo. The Shadow of the Wind is the first of four interrelated novels that form the literary universe of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books—a series that can be read in any order, since each book can be picked up independently and is self-contained. Together, they form an epic jigsaw puzzle of time and place, of events and characters, myriad pieces that ultimately merge into Zafón’s dazzling larger design, a triumph of the novelist’s art.

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The Folio Society’s limited edition of The Shadow of the Wind, is available on foliosociety.com