Daniel is taken by his father to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, where a secret is revealed to him that will change his life forever: it is a secret library where all the forgotten books are kept. The reader who enters there must choose a book and dedicate his life to bringing it out of oblivion. Daniel chooses the book The Shadow of the Wind by Julián Carax. And from there his adventure begins. It is characteristic what Daniel’s father, the bookseller, says to his son about the value of the first book someone reads in their life: “Few things leave such a mark on a reader as the first book that really manages to touch their heart. Those first images, the echo of those words we think we have left behind always accompany us and carve out a palace in our memory, to which sooner or later—no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, how much we learn or forget—we will return.”
In The Shadow of the Wind, Daniel’s father is named Sempere and is a bookseller. The same (?) bookseller Sempere will give David Martín, the young hero who stars in The Angel’s Game, his first book that will move him deeply, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. He will also take him to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books to “bury” the only book Martín wrote, which failed in the city’s market, and at the same time to choose another that he will support throughout his life. Gustavo Barceló, owner of a labyrinthine bookstore, is the other bookseller who appears in both books. Thus, the thread of bibliophilia passes from the first to the second book by Zafón, even though the second (set in the 1920s-30s) is chronologically placed before the first (set in the 1940s).