The Shadow of the Wind

In Barcelona just after the Spanish Civil War, a bookseller named Sempere takes his ten year old son Daniel to a hidden archive called the Cemetery of Forgotten Books and lets him choose one volume to protect for life. Daniel picks a novel called The Shadow of the Wind by a little known writer named Julian Carax, and when he tries to find more of Carax's work he discovers that a disfigured man calling himself Lain Coubert, the name of the devil in Carax's own novel, has been hunting down and burning every surviving copy. Daniel's search pulls in the book dealer Gustavo Barcelo and his blind niece Clara, who becomes his first infatuation, and his loyal, motor mouthed friend Fermin, a former political prisoner who helps him dig through Franco era police files and church records. The buried story turns out to be about Carax and a woman named Penelope Aldaya, half siblings who fell in love without knowing they were related, whose wealthy family locked Penelope away when the truth came out; she died in childbirth along with the baby, and Carax, learning of it years later, took the name of his own novel's devil and began erasing himself along with his books. Daniel eventually marries Bea, who helped him through the investigation, and the novel closes years later with Daniel bringing his own son, named Julian after Carax, to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books in turn.

Zafon writes thick, atmospheric prose that layers a gothic mystery, a ghost story and a civil war history over the same handful of Barcelona streets, and it reads fast for its length, propelled by short chapters and cliffhangers. Some readers find the middle stretch overstuffed with subplot and coincidence, and the atmosphere occasionally outruns the mystery it is building toward, but the city itself, cramped, watchful, still afraid of its own recent past, carries the book even when the plot strains.