The Shadow of the Wind
Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind, first published in Spanish in 2001 and translated into English in 2004, is one of the great literary mysteries of the twenty-first century. Postwar Barcelona is a city of shuttered shops, secret police, and old family wounds. Ten-year-old Daniel Sempere, son of an antiquarian bookseller, is taken at dawn to a place known as the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, where every reader chooses a single volume to protect for the rest of their life. Daniel's choice is a novel called The Shadow of the Wind by Julian Carax, an author almost no one remembers. As Daniel grows up, he discovers that someone has spent years systematically tracking down and burning every other copy of Carax's work, and that the trail of that mysterious figure runs through the broken lives of the people Carax once loved. Zafon braids gothic atmosphere, a tortured love story, the long shadow of the Spanish Civil War, and a love letter to reading itself into a single propulsive narrative. Streets fog, characters are mistaken for one another, secrets surface decades late. Translated lovingly by Lucia Graves, the novel became an international phenomenon and the founding volume of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books quartet.
Themes & atmosphere
Books in conversation with The Shadow of the Wind
A few of the closest reads from our full list.
Where The Shadow of the Wind keeps showing up
One of our editors' lists features this novel.
What you might want to know about The Shadow of the Wind
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
On a misty 1945 morning in post-war Barcelona, ten-year-old Daniel Sempere is taken by his bookseller father to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books and chooses a novel by an unknown writer named Julian Carax. As Daniel grows up, a man with a burned face hunts down every other Carax book in the city.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon's Cemetery of Forgotten Books series has four books: The Shadow of the Wind, The Angel's Game, The Prisoner of Heaven, and The Labyrinth of the Spirits. The series is complete; Zafon died in 2020.
Both publication order and chronological order are popular. Many readers prefer publication order: Shadow of the Wind first, then Angel's Game, Prisoner of Heaven, and Labyrinth of the Spirits. Each can be read independently.
The Shadow of the Wind was written by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, published in 2001 by Phoenix.
The Shadow of the Wind is 528 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Shadow of the Wind takes most readers 8 to 11 hours to finish.
The Shadow of the Wind is a standalone novel by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, not part of a series.
The Shadow of the Wind is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.