Barcelona's Best Kept Secret: The Cemetery of Forgotten Books
April 26, 2026
Part 3 of our Books About Books collection.
“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.”
That line is from The Shadow of the Wind, and it appears early enough that you know immediately what kind of novel you’re in. Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s Cemetery of Forgotten Books series is not about books the way a trivia book is about books. It’s about what books mean. What they carry. What they cost.
The Secret Labyrinth
The Cemetery of Forgotten Books is a vast, labyrinthine library hidden in the heart of Barcelona — a place where books that would otherwise be lost are preserved by a secret society of readers, booksellers, and lovers of literature. The rule of admission: every visitor must choose one book and become its guardian.
In 1945, a young boy named Daniel Sempere is brought to the Cemetery by his father. He chooses a novel by a forgotten author named Julián Carax. When he tries to learn more about Carax, he finds that someone has spent decades hunting down and burning every copy of every book the man ever wrote.
That’s the opening. The series that follows is one of the most celebrated works of literary fiction of the last thirty years — four interconnected novels set across different periods of 20th-century Barcelona, all circling the same mystery from different angles.
The Four Books
1. The Shadow of the Wind (2001) The entry point. Young Daniel’s search for the mystery of Julián Carax unfolds across post-Civil War Barcelona, building through layers of grief, obsession, and violence. A complete novel with a satisfying resolution — but one that opens onto the larger world of the series.
2. The Angel’s Game (2008) Set in the 1920s, this follows David Martín, a struggling writer who receives an unusual commission: write a book to create a religion. Darker and more overtly supernatural than Shadow of the Wind, and set decades before it chronologically.
3. The Prisoner of Heaven (2012) Returns to Daniel Sempere and the world of the first novel, set in 1957. Shorter, more focused, and functions as a bridge between Shadow and the final volume.
4. The Labyrinth of the Spirits (2016) The finale. The longest and most ambitious novel in the series, resolving threads left open across all three previous books. Features a new protagonist alongside returning characters, and brings the full history of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books to light.
The Two Ways to Read It
This is the question every reader faces, and Zafón himself addressed it: the four books are interconnected but designed so each can be read independently, along any path through the labyrinth.
Publication order (recommended): Shadow of the Wind → Angel’s Game → Prisoner of Heaven → Labyrinth of the Spirits
This is the order in which the world reveals itself. You meet it through Daniel’s eyes in 1945, then step back in time for David Martín’s story, then return to familiar characters. The emotional payoff of the finale depends on having met the earlier cast, so publication order gives you the right attachments at the right moments.
Chronological order: Angel’s Game → Shadow of the Wind → Prisoner of Heaven → Labyrinth of the Spirits
Reading The Angel’s Game first gives you the history before the mystery. Some readers who’ve completed the series recommend this for a reread, since you understand the backstory that Shadow of the Wind is slowly uncovering. As a first read, it removes the sense of discovery that makes Shadow so effective.
The consensus: Start with The Shadow of the Wind. The chronological order is a reread strategy.
The Gothic Atmosphere
Zafón’s Barcelona is a city of fog, crumbling architecture, political shadow, and hidden histories. The Franco era — its surveillance, its grief, its officially sanctioned forgetting — runs beneath every novel in the series as a persistent weight. Books are dangerous here, not as magical objects but as political ones: things that can be burned, banned, and erased along with the people who wrote them.
This is the sharpest contrast with the other series in our Books About Books collection. Where Fforde treats the BookWorld as essentially playful and Cogman’s Library is an institution of adventure, Zafón’s Cemetery is a monument to loss — a place books go because they have nowhere else to go.
The prose, in Lucia Graves’s translation, is dense and lyrical. These are not fast books. They’re books for evenings and long afternoons, for reading with attention.
A Finished Series by an Author Who Is Gone
Carlos Ruiz Zafón died in June 2020 at the age of 55. The Labyrinth of the Spirits (2016) is the final word on the Cemetery of Forgotten Books — there will be no additions. The four-volume series exists as he intended it, complete and self-contained.
That completeness is part of what makes it so worth reading. The labyrinth has walls. Every thread eventually finds its end.
Previous in our Books About Books collection: Genevieve Cogman’s Invisible Library — steampunk spies and stolen books →
Next: What happens when the books themselves come alive — and you can hear the characters? Inkheart and The Starless Sea →