Tag: carlos ruiz zafon

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon


Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.
Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

  • Grab your current read
  • Open to a random page
  • Share two “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
  • BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
  • Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

    • The Shadow of the Wind is a gothic thriller-romance written by Spanish writer Carlos Ruiz Zafon and translated into English by Lucia Graves.


    The book opens in the summer of 1945 in Barcelona. Daniel Sempre is taken to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books by his father. It is there that Daniel first finds the book, ‘The Shadow of the Wind’ by Julian Carax. In love with the book, Daniel tries to find out more about the obscure and mysterious author. To his shock, he discovers a man who is out to burn all of Carax’s work. He claims to be a character from the very book, Laín Coubert, the Devil. On his quest to find the truth about Julian Carax, Daniel’s life is altered in ways he couldn’t have imagined possible.

    I notice I have been using the word ‘indescribable’ to describe books more often than should be allowed, but let’s allow it this one last time.

    I chose this teaser because if there’s anyone who can tell exactly what the book is about, it is the writer himself.
    ‘Well, this is a story about books.’
    ‘About books?’
    ‘About accursed books, about the man who wrote them, about a character who broke out of the pages of a novel so that he could burn it, about a betrayal and a lost friendship. It’s a story of love, of hatred, and of the dreams that live in the shadow of the wind.’

    The only thing I think I should say is that I loved how the essence of the story isn’t lost in translation. The magic is still there.

    I had this book for a long time, but never got around to reading it. It was a comment by Stephen King that made me want to pick up this book : If you thought the true gothic novel died with the 19th century, this will change your mind. Shadow is the real deal….Be warned, you have to be a romantic at heart to appreciate this stuff, but if you are, this is one gorgeous read.

    It took me four days and four hundred and seventy four pages to realize that I might as well be a ‘romantic at heart’, because I think I fell in love with this book.