by Carlos Ruiz Zafon and Lucia Graves
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. Before Daniel knows it, his seemingly innocent quest has opened a door into one of Barcelona's darkest secrets, an epic story of murder, magic, madness, and doomed love, and before long he realizes that if he doesn't find out the truth about Julian Carax, he and those closest to him will suffer horribly.
Series: Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The Shadow of the Wind
Ruiz Zafón was born in the city of Barcelona. Growing up in Spain, he began his work life by making money in advertising. His grandparents had worked in a factory and his father sold insurance. In the 1990s Ruiz Zafón moved to Los Angeles where he worked briefly in screen writing. Catalan by birth and also fluent in English, he writes and publishes his novels in Spanish. This not only enables a larger readership, via readers in Spain and South America, but also allows his novels to speak more widely for the country of Spain, in a way that novels written in Catalan or English would not.