October 2015: Our next book

The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafón

The WCRG next meets on Wednesday, 28 October at 7.30pm in Plommer A - a return to the cosy location of previous years' meetings. We will be discussing the 2001 worldwide bestseller, The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. 

The book opens in the post-war Barcelona of 1945. The novel's protagonist is Daniel Sempere, an antiquarian book dealer's son, and when we first meet him, he is just a boy of ten. When Daniel's father takes him to the secret Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a huge library of old, forgotten titles, it is a move that will change his life forever. According to tradition, everyone initiated into this secret place is allowed to take one book from it and must protect it for life. Daniel selects a book called The Shadow of the Wind by Julián Carax.

Daniel falls in love with Carax's words, but when he sets out to find the author's other works, he discovers that Carax is an enigma, and someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book Carax has written. As Daniel's obsession with Carax grows, his curiosity and his burgeoning adulthood open the door to madness, murder and doomed love.