“Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.” This is a quote from The Shadow of the Wind, a 2001 historical/mystery/thriller novel by Spanish author Carlos Ruiz Zafon.
The novel is written in first-person narrative from the perspective of the protagonist, Daniel Sempere, and takes place in post-Civil War Spain. The novel begins when Daniel's father, a bookstore owner, takes ten-year-old Daniel to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. According to his father, The Cemetery of Forgotten books is a sanctuary for books that have been "consigned to oblivion", "waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader's hands". As a bibliophile and lover of antique books, I became hooked from the moment the concept of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books was mentioned.
Daniel chooses The Shadow of the Wind, a novel by Julian Carax. He strongly believes that his novel had been waiting for him for years, perhaps since before he was even born. For me, this concept was endearingly similar to the scene in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, when Harry first chooses his wand at Ollivander's. Little does Daniel know that, like Harry’s phoenix feather wand, book would shape his youth forever.
Daniel falls in love with The Shadow of the Wind, and as any literary enthusiast would, he tries to find other works by this mysterious Julian Carax. However, to his surprise and horror, he finds that someone has been deliberately "erasing" all of Carax's novels, and that the only existing copies of Carax’s works exist in his own hands or in the depths of the Cemetery. This begins Daniel’s investigation into the life of Carax and his works, or more accurately, the disappearance of his works.
As Daniel pursues his case, the investigation becomes a labyrinth of mystery, violence, romance, and tragedy-both of Carax’s and of his acquaintances’. During the process, Daniel befriends Fermin, a former Republican agent reduced to beggary, and he also finds himself a target of Fumero, a notoriously inhumane police officer for Franco, whose dark past is intertwined with that of Carax’s and of Fermin’s as well. Daniel also finds romance with Beatriz, Daniel’s best friend’s older sister and his former nemesis.
The book alternates between flashbacks of Julian Carax's life and Daniel’s present investigation. As we find out more about Carax with each turn of the page, readers are struck with the similarities between the personalities and lives of Carax and Daniel. Zafon especially takes great pains to make the character of Daniel as relatable as possible. While reading the novel, I was able to cringe at his pathetic attempts at impressing his first love, felt a tug at my heart when he first apologized to his father after an outburst of adolescent frustration, and even understood his tumultuous emotions over falling in love with his former childhood nemesis. His sardonic sense of humor, alongside Fermin's spontaneous (and oftentimes R-rated) comments also added a ray of much-needed sunshine to this dark novel.
All in all, I felt that this novel isn't just a written piece of work, it is a work of art. The language is absolutely beautiful, and Zafon's descriptions of Barcelona is enough to make you want to take the next plane headed for Spain. (In fact, at the end of the novel, Zafon provides a map of real-life places in Barcelona that inspired him to write this novel) Not only that, each character in the novel has their own story to tell, and this contributes to the immaculate balance and flow of the novel. But most importantly, Zafon keeps you hanging until the very end of the novel-all 480 pages of it.

Addendum: As a person that had read The Return by Victoria Hislop (another book that I highly recommend), I didn't have that much of a problem understanding the various allusions to the war that cropped up in the novel, but if you don't have a lot of background information on the Spanish Civil War, I highly recommend doing a quick Wikipedia search before reading this novel.