La sombra del viento
Carlos Ruiz Zafón, 2001
★ 4.31 from 759.5k ratings on Goodreads
Mystery, thriller & crime Literary fiction
A boy is taken to a secret library in post-war Barcelona, where one book leads him into a city's buried past. A slow, lyrical gothic mystery that drifts through post-war Barcelona like a memory, warm with wonder and shadowed by dread.
Feels like wonder, dread and melancholy. About memory, love and death.
Who it’s for
You may enjoy this if you like layered literary mysteries soaked in atmosphere and long, winding sentences. Be warned that some readers find the prose slow or overwrought, so patience with ornament is useful here.
Why read it
It offers a city's buried past and the strange hold books have on the people who keep them, told with real emotional sweep.
A page from the book
The promise a father makes over a library no one is allowed to name.
A mis ojos de diez años, aquellos individuos aparecían como una cofradía secreta de alquimistas conspirando a espaldas del mundo. Mi padre se arrodilló junto a mí y, sosteniéndome la mirada, me habló con esa voz leve de las promesas y las confidencias.—Este lugar es un misterio, Daniel, un santuario. Cada libro, cada tomo que ves, tiene alma. El alma de quien lo escribió, y el alma de quienes lo leyeron y vivieron y soñaron con él. Cada vez que un libro cambia de manos, cada vez que alguien desliza la mirada por sus páginas, su espíritu crece y se hace fuerte. Hace ya muchos años, cuando mi padre me trajo por primera vez aquí, este lugar ya era viejo. Quizá tan viejo como la misma ciudad. Nadie sabe a ciencia cierta desde cuándo existe, o quiénes lo crearon. Te diré lo que mi padre me dijo a mí. What readers say
Readers describe a sweeping, emotional story about love, death, and solitude, with vivid nature and a strong sense of ambition and freedom. Some find the prose beautiful and immersive; others find it slow or overwrought.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón.Zafón began as a screenwriter and wrote The Shadow of the Wind after moving to Los Angeles; the novel became a global bestseller.
Books that feel like this
More by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The Shadow of the Wind
Carlos Ruiz Zafón, 2001
A boy finds a forgotten novel in post-war Barcelona and becomes obsessed with the vanished author behind it.
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Questions readers ask
- Is La sombra del viento for me?
- You may enjoy this if you like layered literary mysteries soaked in atmosphere and long, winding sentences. Be warned that some readers find the prose slow or overwrought, so patience with ornament is useful here.
- What is La sombra del viento like?
- A slow, lyrical gothic mystery that drifts through post-war Barcelona like a memory, warm with wonder and shadowed by dread. Feels like wonder, dread and melancholy. About memory, love and death.
- What should I read after La sombra del viento?
- If you liked La sombra del viento, try The Name of the Rose (Umberto Eco), The Night Circus (Erin Morgenstern) and The Name of the Wind (Patrick Rothfuss).
A taste of the feed
The most frightening evil is the kind that never doubts itself.
The Devil is not the Prince of Matter; the Devil is the arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt. The Devil is grim because he knows where he is going, and, in moving, he always returns whence he came.
The Name of the Rose · Umberto Eco
The strangest letter a magician receives is pinned to a five-year-old.
The man billed as Prospero the Enchanter receives a fair amount of correspondence via the theater office, but this is the first envelope addressed to him that contains a suicide note, and it is also the first to arrive carefully pinned to the coat of a five-year-old girl.
The Night Circus · Erin Morgenstern
The moment you decide something strange never happened.
I wondered where the illusion of the second moon had come from, but I only wondered for a moment, and then I dismissed it from my thoughts. Perhaps it was an afterimage, I decided, or a ghost: something that had stirred in my mind, for a moment, so powerfully that I believed it to be real, but now was gone, and faded into the past like a memory forgotten, or a shadow into the dusk.
The Ocean at the End of the Lane · Neil Gaiman
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