The book was translated into English in 2004 by Lucia Graves and sold over a million copies in the UK after already achieving success on mainland Europe, topping the Spanish bestseller lists for weeks.

When word gets around that Daniel possesses the only known copy of The Shadow of the Wind, he receives an inquiry from Gustavo Barceló, a rare-book seller and expert on Carax who wishes to purchase it.

Daniel refuses to sell it, but soon falls in love with Barceló's blind niece, Clara, and begins to pay frequent visits to read The Shadow of the Wind to her.

Daniel befriends a man who goes by the alias of Fermín Romero de Torres, who was imprisoned and tortured in Montjuïc Castle as a result of his involvement in espionage against the government during the Civil War.

They lived a clandestine relationship only through casual furtive glances and faint smiles for around four years, after which they decided to elope to Paris, unaware that the shadows of misfortune had been closing in on them ever since they had met.

The two lovers are doomed to unknown fates just a week before their supposed elopement, which is meticulously planned by Julián's best friend, Miquel Moliner—also the son of a wealthy father.

It is eventually revealed that Miquel loved Julián more than any brother and finally sacrificed his own life for him, having already abandoned his desires and his youth for causes of charity and his friend's well-being after his elopement to Paris—although without Penélope, who never turned up for the rendezvous.

[4] After finishing reading the book, Daniel marries Beatriz "Bea" Aguilar, whom he has loved for a long time and assisted him in his quest to unravel the Carax mystery, in 1956.

If you love A.S. Byatt's Possession: A Romance, Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, the short stories of Borges, Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, Arturo Perez-Reverte's The Club Dumas or Paul Auster's "New York" trilogy, not to mention Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame and William Hjortsberg's Falling Angel, then you will love The Shadow of the Wind.

[15] The San Francisco Chronicle gave the book a negative review, opining that "the combined effect of the foggy setting and soggy writing is of being lost in a swamp.