The books of Carlos Ruiz Zafón have been on my to-be-read list for such a long time since I gained an acceptable fluency in Spanish that I feel quite ashamed to only touch his most famous series, El Cemeterio de los Libros Olvidados, now, after already getting to know Borges, Cortázar, and García Márquez.

"La Sombra del Viento" is the first book in the series and an immediate success of an atmospheric setting, brilliant storytelling, and diverse characters. It is hard to characterize the genre of this book - it starts somewhere between a drama, fantasy, and mystery and ends as the most heartbreaking story about life and death, love and hatred, memory and forgetting. All of it happens on the labyrinthic streets of destroyed and gloomy post-war Barcelona that still makes the reader to fall in love with its unforgettable charm. Flipping through the pages, I could swear I felt the smell of cold autumn rain, the rustling of yellow leaves, and the sounds of the big city. It is one of the things I admire the most about the writing of Ruiz Zafón. While trying to keep balance between the action and lyrical moments, he doesn't fail to deliver the most precise, poetic, and melancholic descriptions.

Every word about the plot of this book feels like a potential spoiler - the best way to discover it is blindly, without looking at the next page and letting the story lead you. Despite a complex mystery plot that grows with multiple sidelines throughout the book, "La Sombra del Viento" remained exciting and unpredictable for me from the first till the very last page. It is an exactly kind of book to cuddle with in the cold October evenings, when the fury of storms and rains is raging behind the window. I found it surprisingly easy to love (and hate) the characters: they all feel alive, complex, and not always understandable, which makes them even more human. One of the things I loved the most about this book was that it didn't pretend to be something pretentious and overcomplicated. I didn't take any deep insights of philosophy or the human psyche from it, but every thought that has left a trace in my memory was perfectly equilibrated between providing me with wisdom and resonating emotionally in my heart.

Not letting myself a second to rest, I immediately continued the series with "El Juego del Ángel" on the very next day after finishing this book. I already feel a pleasant tingle of a great read after finishing just about forty pages and cannot imagine that this gem of contemporary Spanish literature remained, if not hidden, then ignored by me for such a long time.