Clara’s Verdict
There are books that circulate through recommendation networks for years before you finally pick them up – passed from friend to friend with the slightly sheepish qualifier “I know it sounds like nothing, but just trust me.” The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón is that book. I read it in a single obsessive weekend years ago, and the audiobook, narrated by Daniel Weyman, transmits something of that quality: Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter rendered in prose that manages to be simultaneously atmospheric and propulsive. It’s a novel about books and obsession and the weight of the past, and it’s one of the most compelling things you’ll listen to this year.
This is book 1 of The Cemetery of Forgotten Books series – a series, it bears noting, you will almost certainly want to complete once you’ve finished this first volume.
Audible rating: 4.5/5 (25 ratings)
About the Audiobook
Barcelona, 1945. Ten-year-old Daniel is taken by his father – a bookseller – to a labyrinthine secret library known as the Cemetery of Lost Books, where forgotten and out-of-print works are preserved. Daniel is allowed to choose a single book, and selects a novel by an obscure writer named Julián Carax. As he grows up and tries to find more of Carax’s work, he discovers that someone has been systematically tracking down and burning every copy – a figure who presents himself as something close to the devil.
Zafón builds a mystery within a mystery: who was Julián Carax? What happened to him? And why does the answer seem to mirror Daniel’s own life in uncanny ways? The novel is deeply literary in its DNA – it’s about what books do to us, how obsession with a text bleeds into obsession with the life behind it – but it wears its themes lightly, driving forward on the momentum of genuine thriller plotting. The Barcelona setting is integral: the city in the years after the Civil War, scarred and secretive, becomes almost a character in itself.
The Narration
Daniel Weyman narrates at just over seventeen hours, and he’s an excellent choice for this material. His voice has the right quality of restraint – not cold, but measured – that suits a story told in retrospect by a narrator who knows things the young Daniel doesn’t yet. He handles the Spanish names and the various register shifts between comic secondary characters and the more menacing principals with care and consistency. The audio format is, if anything, more immersive than the page for a novel this atmospheric: there’s something appropriate about hearing a story about secrets told to you in the dark.
What Readers Say
The reviews for this novel span decades and are almost uniformly rapturous. One UK reader wrote: “Within the first six pages of this book, I fell in love – I don’t think I can explain the feeling with this book.” Another described the combination of elements: “Some books grab your attention by its title, some by its story, a few by the beauty of the language – when all these come together in a book, you lose your heart to it totally.” A third, coming to it sceptically after extensive word-of-mouth hype, admitted: “Nothing could match the hype, I thought. But the story kicks off in a cracking way.”
Rated 4.5/5 across 25 Audible ratings – high, and earned.
Who Should Listen?
Readers who love novels about books and readers – Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, A.S. Byatt’s Possession – will find this immediately congenial. Also excellent for listeners who want literary fiction that doesn’t sacrifice pace, or thriller readers who want more thematic substance than the genre usually provides. An ideal audiobook for long journeys. If you’ve never read Zafón and start here, you’ll finish wanting the rest of the series immediately.
Listen to The Shadow of the Wind on Audible UK – book 1 of The Cemetery of Forgotten Books.
