Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s novel The Shadow of the Wind was a huge bestseller in his native Spain after it was published in 2001. When it was translated to English a few years later, it became a huge bestseller in the England. What the beginning of the story reminded me of was the story Calliope from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman collection Dream Country. In the story Morpheus punished a man by giving him endless ideas and one of them was a man who got a library card to the library at Alexandria. While that’s not exactly what happens here, it is very close. The book is a gothic mystery book that revolves around books and a mysterious writer whose books have been mysteriously removed from the world…except when our protagonist finds one. And what happens next?

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