Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Carlos Ruiz Zafón was a Spanish novelist whose Gothic literary mystery The Shadow of the Wind became one of the best-selling Spanish novels ever published and a modern classic of European fiction.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón grew up in Barcelona and worked for years as an advertising copywriter and screenwriter before The Shadow of the Wind — published in Spain in 2001 and in English translation in 2004 — made him one of the most internationally read Spanish novelists of his generation. He died in 2020 at 55, leaving behind four novels set in his created world of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.

The Shadow of the Wind is set in post-Civil War Barcelona, a city of shadows, secrets, and Franco’s long surveillance. A young boy discovers a novel by a writer named Julián Carax in a labyrinthine library of forgotten books, and his attempt to learn more about its author draws him into a mystery spanning decades. The novel is Gothic, labyrinthine, romantic, and plotted with extraordinary craft — each revelation opens onto another, and the city of Barcelona itself is as much a character as any of the human figures. The prose, in Lucia Graves’s translation, is lush without tipping into excess.

Zafón wrote with a deliberate love of popular storytelling — he admired Dumas and Dickens — and some literary readers have found The Shadow of the Wind’s emotional intensity melodramatic. That is not a misreading, but it misses what the book is doing: it is unapologetically a story in the grand romantic tradition, and within that tradition it is extraordinary. The Cemetery of Forgotten Books series that followed — The Angel’s Game, The Prisoner of Heaven, The Labyrinth of the Spirits — extended and deepened Zafón’s world, though none quite matched the incandescence of the original.