The Prisoner of Heaven by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

He left at New Year 1992 and wrote a young adult novel, El Príncipe de la Niebla (The Prince of Mist, 1993). “For a young man, apart from organised crime or rock’n’roll”, it was the best way to earn money, he said. Ruiz Zafón started a university course in information science (which included journalism and publishing), but left to work in various Barcelona advertising agencies. Porrúa invited the teenager to his office, told him to take his time and encouraged him to write just what he wanted. Francisco Porrúa, the famous Argentinian publisher of A Hundred Years of Solitude, responded. A dreamer in his classes, aged 16 he sent a 600-page novel to several publishers. The neo-gothic architecture of the building stimulated Ruiz Zafón’s imagination. Believing in education, his parents used contacts to get him into the elite Jesuit Sant Ignasi school in the suburb of Sarrià. His mother, Fina Zafón, was a housewife and his father, Justo Ruiz, was a successful insurance broker from a poor background. The quartet, wrote Rosales, is “a homage to books as a refuge of knowledge and sensibility, against the claws of cruel, insatiable power”.Ĭarlos Ruiz Zafón was born in Barcelona. Ruiz Zafón’s editor at Planeta publishers, Emili Rosales, explained that the writer had the four books mapped out in his mind from the very start. 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. Whereas The Shadow of the Wind was a slow starter, its prequel El Juego del Angel ( The Angel’s Game, 2008), set in the 20s, had an initial print run in Spanish of one million copies and had a rock-star launch in front of 150 journalists in Barcelona’s grand opera house, the Liceu.

The weather reflects the novel’s gothic gloom: Barcelona becomes an unreal city of “ashen skies”, drizzle and fog swirling through chilly streets. Daniel’s destiny is set: he will search for the author of the book he selects, the elusive Julián Carax. There the books lie unloved in dust until someone comes to choose one.

The opening grips the reader by the arm (or throat): the 10-year-old Daniel, anguished because he can no longer remember the face of his dead mother, is taken by his father, a bookseller, to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a secret labyrinth in Barcelona’s Gothic quarter.

The Prisoner of Heaven by Carlos Ruiz Zafón