The Shadow of the Wind

by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, translated by Lucia Graves
4 Stars
Setting: Barcelona, Spain
487 pages
Published 2003

Ellie's Review
This is a beautifully written book! The plot of this mysterious book is so well laid out that at the end I could see how carefully the details were planned from the beginning, yet it wasn't predictable. I really enjoyed this both for the writing and the plot, which doesn't happen often for me.

Book Summary
Barcelona, 1945—Just after the war, a great world city lies in shadow, nursing its wounds, and a boy named Daniel awakes one day to find that he can no longer remember his mother’s face. To console his only child, Daniel’s widowed father, an antiquarian book dealer, initiates him into the secret of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a library tended by Barcelona’s guild of rare-book dealers as a repository for books forgotten by the world, waiting for someone who will care about them again.

Daniel’s father coaxes him to choose a book from the spiraling labyrinth of shelves, one that, it is said, will have a special meaning for him. And Daniel so loves the book he selects, a novel called The Shadow of the Wind by one Julian Carax, that he sets out to find the rest of Carax’s work. To his shock, he discovers that someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book this author has written. In fact, he may have the last of Carax’s books in existence.

See Ellie's review of Zafon's book The Angel's Game.