Channel 4 News Anchor Krishnan Guru Murthy started his journalistic career at the BBC on Newsround and is also a regular columnist for the Metro.

The Shadow of the Wind is set in central Barcelona during the harsh postwar years when dictator Francisco Franco ran the country in a ruthless way. The story peers past the backdrop of a suffering city and often cruel government to focus on the life, love and adventures of a boy named Daniel, a poor bookseller’s son who lives in the heart of Barcelona’s Gothic quarter.

Daniel’s mother dies of cholera in Barcelona in 1939, shortly after the Spanish Civil War. Six years later, aged 10, Daniel wakes up one day and finds he can no longer remember her face. That night his father takes him to the Raval quarter of the city and introduces his son to The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a labyrinth beneath a dome. He tells Daniel, ‘When a library disappears, or a bookshop closes down, when a book is consigned to oblivion, those of us who know this place, its guardians, make sure that it gets here. In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day they will reach a new reader’s hands. Every book you see here has been somebody’s best friend’.

One of the traditions at the cemetery is that a first time visitor chooses a book so ‘that it will always stay alive’. Daniel selects La Sombra del Viento (The Shadow of the Wind) a fabulously rare edition of the last novel, a gothic romance thriller, of Julian Carax, a spectacularly unsuccessful local writer, long presumed dead in a duel in a Parisian cemetery.

Daniel sets about trying to learn more about the book’s mysterious dead author and why his books appear to have been systematically destroyed by a mysterious figure called Lain Coubert. Over the next decade, Daniel begins to piece together the secrets and tragedies that shadowed the author’s life and work. As he grows older, Daniel realises that his burning interest in Carax has earned him enemies and as the story unfolds, Daniel’s life becomes intricately linked with Carax’s, often paralleling it in mysterious and unsettling ways. It ultimately becomes clear that in trying to save Carax’s work, Daniel is saving himself.

The Shadow of the Wind does the lot: Gothic romance, historical drama, coming-of-age quest, political thriller, social comedy, even literary satire. It does star-crossed lovers, fortunes won and lost, skeletons in cupboards, murder, war, magic and miracles, with goodies to fall in love with and baddies to make you shiver.

Fittingly for such a celebration of the imagination, the translation is provided by Robert Graves’s daughter Lucia. To her credit, the language and mood remain intricate and beguiling.

Carlos went to university in Barcelona and early in his career was considered one of Spain’s most successful advertising writers. He left Barcelona in his late 20s and ending up in Los Angeles, where he worked as a screenwriter, a form of writing the novelist describes as ‘like playing a piano in a whorehouse’.

At that point, Carlos was already a successful writer of four novels for young adults. These are works of juvenile mystery that have not yet been translated into English. His 1993 novel, The Prince of Shadow, is about a diabolical prince who grants wishes at very high personal prices. The Lights of September, which came out in 1995, focuses on a toy maker who lives in a haunted mansion alongside mechanical creatures and ghosts from the past. But it wasn’t until The Shadow of the Wind, a new departure for him, that Carlos found the book he’s always wanted to write.

Currently there is much buzz about making a movie version of the book. Carlos, however, isn’t committing to a screen idea, ‘Sometimes it’s OK that a book is just a book’, he says. Books after all, are his great passion. Books inspired the book. Books are all around him, ‘I own enough books to put the Library of Congress out of business, yet I continue to get more and more,’ he admits.

Carlos recently moved back to Barcelona and is working on a second novel, one of a further three that he says will stem indirectly from The Shadow of the Wind, ‘I see this as the first of four novels that use Gothic Barcelona as a base. All four will share the same universe, but you can read just one, or read them in any order. They’re independent stories’. This second novel, will be set in late 19th century Barcelona; a city of violence and conflict far removed from the ‘interesting kind of mirage’ he believes the city has become in recent years.

Here's what they thought...

“I was very dubious about reading a translation from spanish but as it transpired, it was excellent…” T.L. McAllion

“Having read the book once for the pure drive of the story, I will re-read it for the shadows and echoes I found there.” Gill Batchelor

“The Shadow Of The Wind was a wonderful and scary book, after reading it at supper time I was scared to go to bed.” Alan Nairn

“I can quite honestly say that this is one of the best novels I have ever read, it was brilliant, I just loved it.” Liz Fraser

Our featured readers from the Turriff Reading Group were:
Liz Fraser, Ishbel Kitson, Alan Nairn, Neil Burnett, Margaret Flanagan, T.L. McAllion, Frances Stridgen, Jennifer Watt, Marilyn Lyall, Elsie Matthew, Gill Batchelor, Barbara Foad, Irene Sim

Find out more about the books published by Orion from their website >>here
 

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