The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Genre: Fiction

Translated from the Spanish by Lucia Graves, daughter of the poet Robert Graves.

"When a Library disappears,. or a bookshop closes down, when a book is consigned to oblivion, those of us who know this place, it's guardians, make sure that it gets here.  In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader's hands.  In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner.  Every book you see here has been somebody's best friend.  Now they only have us..." ~On the Cemetery of Forgotten Books [Page 4]~

"Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul.  The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it.  Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down it's pages, it's spirit grows and strengthens."  [Page 3 - 4]

Set in Barcelona, the novel plays out over eleven years (1945 - 1956) and follows the story of Daniel Sempere and his loyal friend, Fermin Romero de Torres.

Daniel's mother died when he was very young and, in 1945, his father, the owner of a book store, takes him to The Cemetery of Forgotten Books.  At this very magical mystical place Daniel is given the choice to remove one book for himself and so he discovers The Shadow of the Wind written by an author he does not know, Julián Carax.  And so the adventure begins.

This unknown author sparks Daniel's curiosity and soon the reader is drawn into a world filled with love, mystery and betrayal as Daniel tries to learn more about this strange author.  Over eleven years we see Daniel fall in and out of love, make a new friend or two, come terribly close to dying and getting himself into a few very sticky situations.

This story is beautifully and exceptionally written and each character, no matter how minor or insignificant, is perfectly sculpted by the author.  I fell in love with this book from page one, and the two quotes above had me in tears, prompting the people around me to inquire whether I was alright.  Telling them that the book had made me cry earned me quite a few weird glances...  Once I had finished chapter one I wanted to stop reading, not because there was anything wrong but because if I continued to read then the book would end and then I would have nothing.  And I was right...  Now that it's done I have nothing because I will never be able to read it for the first time again...  Unless I suffer memory loss and that idea looks very tempting to me on a regular basis.

It was a beautiful read and should appear on every one's "Top 5 Books to Read Before I Die" list.

Vanishing Acts – Jodi Picoult

Genre: Fiction

Delia Hopkins’s whole life has been a lie and this lie is suddenly ripped from underneath her with very little warning.  Once the truth is revealed, is it really what Delia wants?  Is her mother the idea she used to picture when she was young? And is her father really such a bad person for what he did?

I love Jodi Picoult’s books and this one was no different.  It was beautifully written and each moment was perfectly captured and described on the page.  As a reader you are drawn into the story and start to think for yourself about what was right and what was wrong.  This is one of the things that I love most about Picoult’s work, as every story has an underlying moral or lesson.  From this book I learnt that not everything is always as it seems and that even though something may be wrong, it may be what is right for the person who does it.

I was a little bit shocked because the novel also mentions, to the very bare minimum, how to make methamphetamine (Crystal Meth/Tik). I did not realise that something like this would be allowed to be published as it might give people ideas, although I suppose the type of people who would get these ideas would not be caught dead reading this book.

Alfred Hitchcock’s A Brief Darkness – Edited by Cathleen Jordan

Genre: Mystery / Horror Short Stories

From a man who fakes a botched armed robbery to be rid of his wife, to an abandoned home with dark secrets, this is quite a wonderful collection of ‘scary' short stories well put together.  I didn't find them quite as scary as one would have thought but I definitely did enjoy them.  Each story provided it's own little thrill for the day, complicated enough not to be boring, but easy enough to finish within an hour.  It's a wonderful book if you're looking for a little bit of a thrill everyday without having to focus too much on what is actually happening.