The Shadow of the Wind
Barcelona, 1945. A mysterious book, a woman named Penelope who disappeared. Zafon builds a Gothic love story within a love letter to books themselves. The romance at the heart of the novel's nested mysteries is tragic and lyrical; Zafon understood that forbidden love is most powerful when it cannot even be fully known.
That central conceit, the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, is wonderful, and almost everything Zafón builds around it is melodrama: coincidences stacked on coincidences, a cartoon sadist of a villain in Inspector Fumero, and prose that reaches for the lush and lands on the overwrought. The doomed romance is laid on thick. Trim a third and the book would lose little but page count.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
