Carlos Ruiz Zafón and his Unforgotten Books
Carlos Ruiz Zafón was a Spanish author whose work includes the international phenomenon The Shadow of the Wind, and The Angel’s Game. His work has been published in more than forty different languages, and honored with numerous international awards.
Early Life
Carlos Ruiz Zafón was born in Barcelona in 1964. Although his parents came from modest backgrounds, they believed in education and used contacts to get him into the elite Jesuit Sant Ignasi school in the Barcelona suburb of Sarrià.
The neo-gothic architecture of the building stimulated Carlos’s imagination. A dreamer in his classes, aged 16 he sent a 600-page novel to several publishers. Francisco Porrúa, the famous Argentinian publisher of A Hundred Years of Solitude, responded. Porrúa invited the teenager to his office, told him to take his time and encouraged him to write just what he wanted.
Ruiz Zafón started a university course in information science (which included journalism and publishing), but left to work in advertising. He stuck at this for many years but eventually he gave it up to follow his heart.
Literary Career
His first book was the Young Adult novel, published in Spanish, El príncipe de la Niebla in 1993. The novel won the Edebé prize, paying a prize of 24,000 euros. Later this was translated and published as The Prince of Mist in 2011. He followed this with three additional young adult novels, El palacio de la Medianoche in 1994 (translated as The Midnight Palace), Las luces de Septiembre in 1995 (The Watcher in the Shadows) and Marina in 1999.
He became famous with his 2001 thriller, set in gloomy 1940’s Barcelona, La Sombra del Viento, which followed a boy called Daniel Sempre who is taken by his father to the Cemetery of Lost Books in Barcelona and involves his quest to track down the man responsible for destroying every book written by author Julian Carax. The novel was translated into English as The Shadow of the Wind by Lucia Graves in 2004, and became an international hit.
The Angel’s Game published in 2008, is a prequel to Shadow of the Wind. Two more big-selling sequels to The Shadow of the Wind followed: the lighter, more humorous El Prisionero del Cielo (The Prisoner of Heaven, 2011) and El Laberinto de los Espíritus (The Labyrinth of the Spirits, 2016), to make up the quartet The Cemetery of Forgotten Books.
There was also a posthumous collection of short stories, La ciudad de vapor (The City of Mist) published in 2021. It features many of the characters that appear in the The Cemetery of Forgotten Books quartet.
Personal Life
Around the time of his first published book in 1993, he married Mari Carmen Bellver, a translator whom he had met when they both worked in advertising. With the Edebé prize money they decided to move to Los Angeles. He continued writing young adult novels and, as he was huge film lover, he also dabbled in writing scripts without much success.
The couple tried living in Barcelona again for two years in the early 2000s, but returned to California, where in 2008 they bought a house in South Beverley Hills. He had an obsession with dragons, owning a collection of around 500 pictures and sculpture. He also named all his homes Dragonland. A keen musician he was known to sometimes perform on the piano at his book launches.
At the age of only 55, after fighting colorectal cancer for a few years, he sadly passed away in 2020.
Best Carlos Ruiz Zafón Books
The Shadow of the Wind
Barcelona, 1945: Just after the war, a great world city lies in shadow, nursing its wounds, and a boy named Daniel awakes on his 11th birthday to find that he can no longer remember his mother’s face. To console his only child, Daniel’s widowed father, an antiquarian book dealer, initiates him into the secret of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a library tended by Barcelona’s guild of rare-book dealers as a repository for books forgotten by the world, waiting for someone who will care about them again.
Daniel’s father coaxes him to choose a volume from the spiraling labyrinth of shelves, one that, it is said, will have a special meaning for him. And Daniel so loves the novel he selects, The Shadow of the Wind by one Julian Carax, that he sets out to find the rest of Carax’s work. To his shock, he discovers that someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book this author has written. In fact, he may have the last one in existence. Before Daniel knows it, his seemingly innocent quest has opened a door into one of Barcelona’s darkest secrets, an epic story of murder, magic, madness, and doomed love.
Marina
In May 1980, 15-year-old Óscar Drai suddenly vanishes from his boarding school in the old quarter of Barcelona. For seven days and nights no one knows his whereabouts…
His story begins in the heart of old Barcelona, when he meets Marina and her father German Blau, a portrait painter. Marina takes Óscar to a cemetery to watch a macabre ritual that occurs on the fourth Sunday of each month. At 10 a.m. precisely a coach pulled by black horses appears. From it descends a woman dressed in black, her face shrouded, wearing gloves, holding a single rose. She walks over to a gravestone that bears no name, only the mysterious emblem of a black butterfly with open wings.
When Óscar and Marina decide to follow her they begin a journey that will take them to the heights of a forgotten, post-war Barcelona, a world of aristocrats and actresses, inventors and tycoons; and a dark secret that lies waiting in the mysterious labyrinth beneath the city streets.
Labyrinth of the Spirits
The final installment of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books series. In The Labyrinth of the Spirits, we meet Alicia Gris, a brave but troubled young woman who was orphaned during the Spanish Civil War and recruited to become a member of the Spanish secret police. Alicia reluctantly agrees to investigate one final case in exchange for her freedom. She and her partner, Juan Manuel Vargas, must investigate the disappearance of Spain’s Minister of Culture, Mauricio Valls.
When Alicia discovers a copy of a rare book by Victor Mataix hidden in Valls’ desk, she and Vargas start down a twisting path that leads them back to Barcelona and eventually reveals connections between Valls’ mysterious disappearance and a series of atrocities committed years earlier during the corrupt Franco regime. At the same time, Alicia must confront her own complicated past, which includes a return to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.
The City of Mist
Carlos Ruiz Zafón conceived of this collection of stories as an appreciation to the countless admirers who joined him on the extraordinary journey that began with The Shadow of the Wind. Comprising 11 stories, most of them never before published in English, The City of Mist offers the listener compelling characters, unique situations, and a gothic atmosphere reminiscent of his beloved Cemetery of Forgotten Books quartet.
The stories are mysterious, imbued with a sense of menace, and told with the warmth, wit, and humor of Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s inimitable voice.
A boy decides to become a writer when he discovers that his creative gifts capture the attentions of an aloof young beauty who has stolen his heart. A labyrinth maker flees Constantinople to a plague-ridden Barcelona, with plans for building a library impervious to the destruction of time. A strange gentleman tempts Cervantes to write a book like no other, each page of which could prolong the life of the woman he loves. And a brilliant Catalan architect named Antoni Gaudí reluctantly agrees to cross the ocean to New York, a voyage that will determine the fate of an unfinished masterpiece.
Check out our reading list for the Best Magical Realism Books to read.