People, read, even if it were the worst...

When the ten-year-old son of an antiquarian, Daniel, visits the strange Barcelona burial ground of books in the famine year of 1945, he is intrigued by Julián Carax's novel The Shadow of the Wind. The melancholic boy is captivated by the story, eager to find out more about the mysterious writer, and searches for him for a long time with the obsession of a trained detective. And suddenly things start happening around the book, which has survived in a single copy. Above all, someone knows a lot about her. The boy even begins to be tracked down by a person who intends to get her from him no matter what. In addition, it is as if the work begins to be written into the life of Daniel and his loved ones, as Carax's characters grow into the lives of real people... Ruiz Zafón interweaves the best practices of Gothic prose with elements of a love and initiation novel. The result is a captivating thriller in the style of the magical libraries of Papa Borges, set in the times of a hard-pressed Spain after the civil war, still gripped by the dictator Franco's regime - and still relying on the purifying power of the word.
The first part of the novel series Cemetery of Forgotten Books takes the listener through the winding Catalan metropolis and the shadows of modern Spanish history. Shortly after publication, the prose became a bestseller.


performer: Gustav Hašek
length of recording: 16 hours 42 minutes