Though the quest seems innocent enough at the start, it doesn’t take long for Daniel to cross the doors to Barcelona’s darker side, bumping into some truly foul and dangerous individuals along the way. His refusal to part with the novel leads Daniel past the point of no return as he feels himself drawn to Carax, trying to reconstruct his fate to find out what really happened to a unique man who brought more mysteries to the world dead than alive. To begin with, he quickly learns that someone has been hunting down and destroying every single copy of any Julian Carax novel, someone he is bound to meet very soon. Intrigued, Daniel sets out to find some of the man’s other works, but the task proves a little more complicated than first anticipated. He’s allowed to pick a single book, and chooses the titular The Shadow of the Wind by Julian Carax, a dead author seemingly nobody has ever heard of. The story kicks off when Daniel’s father brings him to the Cemetery of Forgotten books, a house where works abandoned by the world are being preserved.

Daniel might be young, but he’s about to make a choice which will bind his destiny. The first instalment in The Cemetery of Forgotten Books begins by introducing us to Daniel Sempere, son of a widowed bookkeeper living in 1945 Barcelona, a city still recovering from the tumultuous Spanish Civil War, not to mention the other, much more prominent war which ended that year. In The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafon writes an ode to the power of literature, weaving around it an epic tale of intrigue, love, and murder. Nevertheless, books still haven’t lost their place in society, and hold special meanings for those willingly touched by them. Carlos Ruiz Zafon Opens the Doors to the Cemeteryĭespite their best efforts, modern authors haven’t been able to completely stifle the way in which modern technology has been robbing present and future generations from the desire to read after all, one can hardly compete against a zeitgeist.

Carlos zafon shadow of the wind