Shadowing Carlos Ruiz Zafon (From Oxford Mail)

Shadowing Carlos Ruiz Zafon

5:15pm Thursday 18th December 2008

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It is now almost 10 years since I took a two-week vacation in Barcelona, dragging the slightly-miffed missus to a number of dingy backstreet bookstores.

One of my favourite books in recent years was Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind, which came out in 2004.

The book was translated into English by Lucia Graves and has sold over a million copies in the UK alone.

I liked the mystery story set in Barcelona so much that I went out of my way to get a special collector's edition, published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, and I reckon it's time I gave it a second read.

Ruiz Zafon's second novel, The Angel's Game, is a prequel to The Shadow of the Wind and will be published in the UK by Weidenfeld in the Spring.

According to some cursory searching of the worldwide web, The Angel's Game is set in Barcelona in the 1920s and 1930s and follows a young writer who is approached by a mysterious figure to write a book.

I'm hoping the story will also feature the spooky Cemetery of Forgotten Books, which cropped up in the first story.

If you look on the net, there are plenty of tours of the districts of Barcelona where The Shadow of the Wind is set, and I would love to return to the Catalan capital 10 years after my first trip, to celebrate the publication of Zafon's sequel.

I am also trying to get hold of a copy of Cornelia Funke's Inkheart, which has been turned into a Golden Compass-style blockbuster.

I think the film is out on January 23 and in the absence of a sequel to The Golden Compass, the film of Philip Pullman's Northern Lights novel, it looks a good watch.

Villainous characters in children's stories suddenly come to life, which sounds right up my street.