Book Reviews
The melodrama and complications of Shadow, expertly translated by Lucia Graves, can approach excess, though it's a pleasurable and exceedingly well-managed excess. We are taken on a wild ride—for a ride, we may occasionally feel—that executes its hairpin bends with breathtaking lurches.
Richard Eder - The New York Times
Anyone who enjoys novels that are scary, erotic, touching, tragic and thrilling should rush right out to the nearest bookstore and pick up The Shadow of the Wind. Really, you should.
Michael Dirda - The Washington Post
A thriller, a historical novel and a comedy of manners, but above all, the story of a tragic love...with great narrative skill, the author interweaves his plots and enigmas, like a set of Russian dolls in an unforgettable story about the secrets of the heart and the enchantment of books, maintaining the suspense right to the very last page.
La Vanguardia
As magnetic as The Dumas Club, as unsettling as The Mystery of the Haunted Crypt and with a plot as complex and well rounded as The Name of The Rose — to be recommended one hundred percent.
La Razon
I was enthralled by Zafon's book and it gave me many hours of great delight. Not only because the story is set in a book shop, not only because it is about the search and the hunt for books and there is a library of forgotten books to be discovered, but because The Shadow of the Wind is suspenseful like a thriller, poetic like a love story, sometimes mysterious like its title, and because it describes the characters and the storyline so wonderfully that the reader wants to be a part of it. A paean to reading and to the love of books.
Westdeutscher Rundfunk
Ruiz Zafon strives for a literary tone, and no scene goes by without its complement of florid, cute and inexact similes and metaphors…. [T]he colorful cast of characters, the gothic turns and the straining for effect only give the book the feel of… the Hollywood version of a great 19th-century novel.
Publishers Weekly
[C]omplex, Byzantine, at times longwinded work…. Recommended primarily for public libraries and especially for readers who lead double lives as bibliophiles. —Lawrence Olszewski, OCLC Lib., Dublin, OH
Library Journal
The histories of a mysterious book and its enigmatic author are painstakingly disentangled in this yeasty Dickensian romance…. The Shadow of the Wind will keep you up nights—and it'll be time well spent. Absolutely marvelous.
Kirkus Reviews