Used book – The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafón

In post-Civil War Barcelona, a "city of wonders" scarred by defeat, life is hard, and hatred still lingers. On a foggy morning in 1945, a man takes his young son - Daniel Sempere, the narrator - to a mysterious place in the Gothic Quarter: the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. The child, still dreaming of his deceased mother, is thus invited by his father, a humble second-hand bookseller, to a strange ritual passed down from generation to generation: he must "adopt" a volume from among hundreds of thousands. There, he encounters the book that will change the course of his life, mark him forever, and draw him into a labyrinth of adventures and secrets "buried in the soul of the city": The Shadow of the Wind. With this historical tableau, a coming-of-age novel evoking the stirrings of adolescence, a fantastic tale in the pure tradition of The Phantom of the Opera or The Master and Margarita, an enigma where mysteries fit together like Russian dolls, Carlos Ruiz Zafon inextricably intertwines literature and life.