The Angel’s Game: A Thrilling, Gothic Journey Into the Mind of an Author
A Book Review
The success of a book can be a very strange thing. Some books are huge bestsellers but are written quite poorly, while others are critically acclaimed yet sell very few copies. And there are some that achieve a cult following, sometimes years after the author’s death.
It is extremely rare, however, for a novel to be critically acclaimed, an international bestseller and a cult classic. Carlos Ruiz Zafon accomplished this literary hat trick with his novel The Shadow of the Wind. Released in Spanish in 2001, and translated into English in 2004, The Shadow of the Wind has been universally praised by critics around the globe and has sold 15 million copies worldwide. As for the cult following, it is one of those books you’ll buy several times a year because you keep giving your copy away to friends.
Success, however, can be a writer’s worst enemy, and huge global success even more so. Following the massive success of The Shadow of the Wind, the question was when the second book in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books series would arrive and whether there was any way it could live up to the bar set by that first novel. Seven years later we got the answer to both.
