The Prisoner of Heaven: Book Three in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books Series
A book review
I have previously reviewed the first two novels in Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s excellent Cemetery of Forgotten Books series, the phenomenal (and phenomenally successful) The Shadow of the Wind and the equally gripping The Angel’s Game. In The Prisoner of Heaven, the third in the four-book series, we return to the familiar Sempere and Son’s Bookshop in Barcelona, and like the previous books the story is told in both the present and the past. For this novel, the present is 1957 (a few years after the events in The Shadow of the Wind) and the past is the early 1940s (just after the end of the events in The Angel’s Game).
In the first novel the main character was Daniel Sempere, and in the second it was David Martin. What makes The Prisoner of Heaven stand out besides Zafon’s signature Gothic atmosphere and a tightly woven plot is that this book focuses on perhaps his greatest character: Fermin Romero de Torres. A crucial but supporting character prior to this (and the best literary sidekick since Sancho Panza), here Fermin grabs center stage and never relinquishes it.
The story opens with Fermin preparing for his wedding when a mysterious figure from his past arrives at the Sempere and Sons Bookshop, threatening to reveal a decades-old secret that could…
