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Carlos Marrodan Casas

    Memories of my melancholy whores
    The Prince of Mist
    The Watcher in the Shadows
    Modern Classics: The Autumn of the Patriarch
    The Shadow of the Wind
    • The Shadow of the Wind

      • 506 pages
      • 18 hours of reading

      Hidden in the heart of the old city of Barcelona is the 'cemetery of lost books', a labyrinthine library of obscure and forgotten titles that have long gone out of print. To this library, a man brings his 10-year-old son Daniel one cold morning in 1945. Daniel is allowed to choose one book from the shelves and pulls out 'La Sombra del Viento' by Julian Carax. But as he grows up, several people seem inordinately interested in his find. Then, one night, as he is wandering the old streets once more, Daniel is approached by a figure who reminds him of a character from La Sombra del Viento, a character who turns out to be the devil. This man is tracking down every last copy of Carax's work in order to burn them. What begins as a case of literary curiosity turns into a race to find out the truth behind the life and death of Julian Carax and to save those he left behind. A page-turning exploration of obsession in literature and love, and the places that obsession can lead.

      The Shadow of the Wind
      4.5
    • One of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's most intricate and ambitious works, The Autumn of the Patriarch is a brilliant tale of a Caribbean tyrant and the corruption of power. From charity to deceit, benevolence to violence, fear of God to extreme cruelty, the dictator of The Autumn of the Patriarch embodies the best but also the worst of human nature. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the renowned master of magical realism, vividly portrays the dying tyrant caught in the prison of his own dictatorship. Employing an innovative, dreamlike style, and overflowing with symbolic descriptions, the novel transports the reader to a world that is at once fanciful and vividly real.

      Modern Classics: The Autumn of the Patriarch
      3.9
    • The Watcher in the Shadows

      • 246 pages
      • 9 hours of reading

      Bestselling author Carlos Ruiz Zafón's tale of one magical summer that turns into a nightmare when a young girl discovers the secrets locked into a reclusive toymaker's mansion. A mysterious toymaker who lives as a recluse in an old mansion, surrounded by the mechanical beings he has created... an enigma surrounding strange lights that shine through the mists that envelop the small island on which the old lighthouse stands... a shadowy creature that hides deep in the woods... these are the elements of a mystery that bind 14-year-old Irene to Ismael during one magical summer spent in the Blue Bay. Irene's mother has taken a job as a housekeeper for the toymaker, Lazarus, but his house contains more secrets than Irene and Ishmael have bargained for.

      The Watcher in the Shadows
      3.8
    • From the bestselling author of The Shadow of the Wind, the haunting story of a ghostly ship and an age-old curse

      The Prince of Mist
      3.7
    • 'The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin' Memories of My Melancholy Whores is a sensual and hypnotic journey through the mind of a man discovering love for the first time after a lifetime filled with hundreds of different women. The nights spent sleeping side-by-side with his 'Delgadina' fill his soul with an unexpected longing. He feels her presence when she is not there. The now passionate meditations of his newspaper columns are bound up in love and received by a rapturous, growing readership, and in his imagination - as real for him as memories - he sees them together as they might have been. This is a story of one man's reassessment of his life as he awakens to the transformative power of love.

      Memories of my melancholy whores
      3.6