The histories of a mysterious book and its enigmatic author are
painstakingly disentangled in this yeasty Dickensian romance: a
first novel by a Spanish novelist now living in the US. We meet its
engaging narrator Daniel Sempere in 1945, when he's an 11-year-old
boy brought by his father, a Barcelona rare-book dealer, to a
secret library known as the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.
Enthralled, Daniel "chooses" an obscure novel, The Shadow of the
Wind, a complex quest tale whose author, Julian Carax, reputedly
fled Spain at the outbreak of its Civil War, and later died in
Paris. Carax and his book obsess Daniel for a decade, as he grows
to manhood, falls in and out of fascination, if not love with three
beguiling women, and comes ever closer to understanding who Carax
was and how he was connected to the family of tyrannical Don
Ricardo Aldaya-and why a sinister, "faceless" stranger who
identifies himself as Carax's fictional creation ("demonic") "Lain
Coubert" has seemingly "got out of the pages of a book so that he
could burn it." Daniel's investigations are aided, and sometimes
impeded, by a lively gallery of vividly evoked supporting
characters. Prominent among them are secretive translator Nuria
Monfort (who knows more about Carax's Paris years than she
initially reveals); Aldaya family maid Jacinta Coronada, consigned
to a lunatic asylum to conceal what she knows; Daniel's ebullient
Sancho Panza Fermin Romero de Torres, a wily vagrant working as
"bibliographic detective" in the Semperes' bookstore; and vengeful
police inspector Fumero, a Javert-like stalker whose refusal to
believe Carax is dead precipitates the climax-at which Daniel
realizes he's much more than just a reader of Carax's intricate,
sorrowful story. The Shadow of the Wind will keep you up nights-and
it'll be time well spent. Absolutely marvelous. (Kirkus Reviews)
Barcelona, 1945: A city slowly heals in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, and Daniel, an antiquarian book dealer’s son who mourns the loss of his mother, finds solace in a mysterious book entitled "The Shadow of the Wind", by one Julián Carax.
But when he sets out to find the author’s other works, he makes a shocking discovery: someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book Carax has written. In fact, Daniel may have the last of Carax’s books in existence.
Soon Daniel’s seemingly innocent quest opens a door into one of Barcelona’s darkest secrets - an epic story of murder, madness, and doomed love.
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