What can literature hold? The thriller The Shadow of the Wind, with elements of historical, gothic and detective fiction, has become a cult book phenomenon
When the ten-year-old son of an antiquarian bookseller, Daniel, visits Barcelona's strange book burial ground in the hungry year 1945, he is drawn to Julián Carax's novel The Shadow of the Wind. The melancholic boy is captivated by the story, longs to find out more about the mysterious writer and searches for him with the obsession of a trained detective. And suddenly things start happening around the book, which has survived in a single copy. First of all, everybody knows a lot about her. The guy even starts stalking a man who intends to get her away from him.
Moreover, it is as if the work has begun to inscribe itself in the lives of Daniel and his loved ones, as Carax's characters grow into the lives of real people... Ruiz Zafón interweaves the time-honoured techniques of gothic prose with elements of the novel of love and initiation. The result is a compelling thriller in the style of Papa Borges' magical books, set in a post-civil war Spain hard-pressed by the regime of dictator Franco - and still relying on the cleansing power of words.
The first part of the novel series The Burial Ground of Forgotten Books takes the listener through the winding Catalan metropolis and the shadows of modern Spanish history. Shortly after its publication, the prose became a bestseller.
