Dawn is breaking in post-war Barcelona when Daniel’s bookseller father guides him through the mist to a mysterious building hidden in the heart of the old city. Here in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, ten-year-old Daniel is allowed to choose one from the hundreds of thousands of abandoned volumes that line the labyrinthine corridors. Inexplicably drawn to ‘The Shadow of the Wind’ by Julian Carax, the boy clutches the book and he and his father leave. That night Daniel reads through the night totally captivated by the story and the quality of the writing and I know exactly how he felt as although my all night reading sessions are well behind me as I found it difficult to put this remarkable book by Zafón down. Perhaps a longer section than I would normally quote will give an insight into the wonderful descriptive prose and the building tension that is maintained throughout the 511 pages. This passage is very early in the book so doesn’t contain any spoilers and describes the night after Daniel took the book to Don Gustavo Barceló, another bookseller but one who knew more about the rarities of printing than Daniel’s father, for him to have a look at. There he discovered that he may well have the last remaining copy of Carax’s final novel and that all the other copies along with editions of all his other books had been systematically bought or stolen and mysteriously found burned over the years.

I turned off the light and sat in my father’s old armchair. The breeze from the street made the curtains flutter. I was not sleepy, nor did I feel like trying to sleep. I went over to the balcony and looked out far enough to see the hazy glow shed by the streetlamps in Puerta del Angel. A motionless figure stood in a patch of shadow on the cobbled street. The flickering amber glow of a cigarette was reflected in his eyes. He wore dark clothes, with one hand buried in the pocket of his jacket, the other holding the cigarette that wove a web of blue smoke around his profile. He observed me silently, his face obscured by the street lighting behind him. He remained there for almost a minute smoking nonchalantly, his eyes fixed on mine. Then, when the cathedral bells struck midnight, the figure gave a faint nod of the head, followed, I sensed, by a smile that I could not see. I wanted to return the greeting but was paralysed. The figure turned, and I saw the man walking away, with a slight limp. Any other night I would barely have noticed the presence of that stranger, but as soon as I’d lost sight of him in the mist, I felt a cold sweat on my forehead and found it hard to breathe. I had read an identical description of that scene in The Shadow of the Wind. In the story the protagonist would go out onto the balcony every night at midnight and discover that a stranger was watching him from the shadows, smoking nonchalantly. The stranger’s face was always veiled by darkness, and only his eyes could be guessed at in the night, burning like hot coals. The stranger would remain there, his right hand buried in the pocket of his black jacket, and then he would go away, limping. In the scene I had just witnessed, that stranger could have been any person of the night, a figure with no face and no name. In Carax’s novel, that figure was the devil.

The plot flies along at a breakneck speed with multiple clues as well as a few blind alleys as to what is going on as Daniel tries to find out what happened to Julian Carax and how he came to be found shot dead in Barcelona when he should have been safely in Paris and what the wartime thug, murderer and now Inspector of Police Fumero has to do with it, as we progress from 1945 when Daniel first visits the Cemetery of Forgotten Books to the end of 1955 when the story finally reaches its denouement. Along the way a cast of superbly drawn characters are introduced, some of which help but more than a few are there to hinder Daniel’s fascination with Carax and his slowly developing interest in women as he goes through his adolescence. At about two thirds through the book and three days after I started I still hasn’t worked out how everybody was linked and how the various plot strands were connected so took an evening off reading to think through what I knew so far without adding more detail. This proved to be a good idea as I finally realised where the story was going and who the man watching from the shadows was, just in time as Zafón was about to upend the story and make my guess a possibility. I read the remainder of the book the next evening as Zafón neatly tied up all the loose ends in an eminently satisfying way.

Sadly Carlos Ruiz Zafón died of cancer in 2020 aged just 55, robbing the world of a great author well before his time. This English language version of the book is translated by Lucia Graves, daughter of the poet and novelist Robert Graves. She was brought up in Mallorca from the age of three, and according to her memoir ‘A Woman Unknown’ she grew up speaking English at home, Catalan with locals, and Spanish at school and it is she who has translated into English all five of Zafón’s ‘Cemetery of Forgotten’ novels.

This is the fifth book from the Penguin Drop Caps series I have written about along with a general overview of the series. There are twenty six in total, one author per letter of the alphabet and previously I have covered Ellery Queen, John Steinbeck, Xinran and W B Yeats.