Product Description

From master storyteller Carlos Ruiz Zafon, author of the international phenomenon The Shadow of the Wind, comes The Angel’s Game — a dazzling new page-turner about the perilous nature of obsession, in literature and in love.


The whole of Barcelona stretched out at my feet and I wanted to believe that when I opened those windows — my new windows — each evening its streets would whisper stories to me, secrets in my ear, that I could catch on paper and narrate to whomever cared to listen…

In an abandoned mansion at the heart of Barcelona, a young man, David Martin, makes his living by writing sensationalist novels under a pseudonym. The survivor of a troubled childhood, he has taken refuge in the world of books and spends his nights spinning baroque tales about the city’s underworld. But perhaps his dark imaginings are not as strange as they seem, for in a locked room deep within the house lie photographs and letters hinting at the mysterious death of the previous owner.

Like a slow poison, the history of the place seeps into his bones as he struggles with an impossible love. Close to despair, David receives a letter from a reclusive French editor, Andreas Corelli, who makes him the offer of a lifetime. He is to write a book unlike anything that has ever existed — a book with the power to change hearts and minds. In return, he will receive a fortune, and perhaps more. But as David begins the work, he realizes that there is a connection between his haunting book and the shadows that surround his home.

Once again, Zafon takes us into a dark, gothic universe first seen in The Shadow of the Wind and creates a breathtaking adventure of intrigue, romance, and tragedy. Through a dizzyingly constructed labyrinth of secrets, the magic of books, passion, and friendship blend into a masterful story.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1539 in Books
• Published on: 2009-06-16
• Released on: 2009-06-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 1.40" h x 6.40" w x 9.60" l, 1.96 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 544 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780385528702
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
Book Description
From master storyteller Carlos Ruiz Zafón, author of the international phenomenon The Shadow of the Wind, comes The Angel’s Game--a dazzling new page-turner about the perilous nature of obsession, in literature and in love.

“The whole of Barcelona stretched out at my feet and I wanted to believe that, when I opened those windows, its streets would whisper stories to me, secrets I could capture on paper and narrate to whomever cared to listen...”

In an abandoned mansion at the heart of Barcelona, a young man, David Martín, makes his living by writing sensationalist novels under a pseudonym. The survivor of a troubled childhood, he has taken refuge in the world of books and spends his nights spinning baroque tales about the city’s underworld. But perhaps his dark imaginings are not as strange as they seem, for in a locked room deep within the house lie photographs and letters hinting at the mysterious death of the previous owner.

Like a slow poison, the history of the place seeps into his bones as he struggles with an impossible love. Close to despair, David receives a letter from a reclusive French editor, Andreas Corelli, who makes him the offer of a lifetime. He is to write a book unlike anything that has ever existed--a book with the power to change hearts and minds. In return, he will receive a fortune, and perhaps more. But as David begins the work, he realizes that there is a connection between his haunting book and the shadows that surround his home.

Once again, Zafón takes us into a dark, gothic universe first seen in The Shadow of the Wind and creates a breathtaking adventure of intrigue, romance, and tragedy. Through a dizzingly constructed labyrinth of secrets, the magic of books, passion, and friendship blend into a masterful story.

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Carlos Ruiz Zafón on The Angel's Game

Years ago, when I began working on my fifth novel, The Shadow of the Wind, I started toying around with the idea of creating a fictional universe that would be articulated through four interconnected stories in which we would meet some of the same characters at different times in their lives, and see them from different perspectives where many plots and subplots would tie around in knots for the reader to untie. It sounds somewhat pretentious, but my idea was to add a twist to the story and provide the reader with what I hoped would be a stimulating and playful reading experience. Since these books were, in part, about the world of literature, books, reading and language, I thought it would be interesting to use the different novels to explore those themes through different angles and to add new layers to the meaning of the stories.

At first I thought this could be done in one book, but soon I realized it would make Shadow of the Wind a monster novel, and in many ways, destroy the structure I was trying to design for it. I realized I would have to write four different novels. They would be stand-alone stories that could be read in any order. I saw them as a Chinese box of stories with four doors of entry, a labyrinth of fictions that could be explored in many directions, entirely or in parts, and that could provide the reader with an additional layer of enjoyment and play. These novels would have a central axis, the idea of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, set against the backdrop of a highly stylized, gothic and mysterious Barcelona. Since each novel was going to be complex and difficult to write, I decided to take one at a time and see how the experiment evolved on its own in an organic way.

It all sounds very complicated, but it is not. At the end of the day, these are just stories that share a universe, a tone and some central themes and characters. You don’t need to care or know about any of this stuff to enjoy them. One of the fun things about this process was it allowed me to give each book a different personality. Thus, if Shadow of the Wind is the nice, good girl in the family, The Angel’s Game would be the wicked gothic stepsister. Some readers often ask me if The Angel’s Game is a prequel or a sequel. The answer is: none of these things, and all of the above. Essentially The Angel’s Game is a new book, a stand-alone story that you can fully enjoy and understand on its own. But if you have already read The Shadow of the Wind, or you decide to read it afterwards, you’ll find new meanings and connections that I hope will enhance your experience with these characters and their adventures.

The Angel’s Game has many games inside, one of them with the reader. It is a book designed to make you step into the storytelling process and become a part of it. In other words, the wicked, gothic chick wants your blood. Beware. Maybe, without realizing, I ended up writing a monster book after all... Don’t say I didn’t warn you, courageous reader. I’ll see you on the other side. --Carlos Ruiz Zafón

(Photo © Isolde Ohlbaum)

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Fans of Zafón's The Shadow of the Wind and new readers alike will be delighted with this gothic semiprequel. In 1920s Barcelona, David Martin is born into poverty, but, aided by patron and friend Pedro Vidal, he rises to become a crime reporter and then a beloved pulp novelist. David's creative pace is frenetic; holed up in his dream house—a decrepit mansion with a sinister history—he produces two great novels, one for Vidal to claim as his own, and one for himself. But Vidal's book is celebrated while David's is buried, and when Vidal marries David's great love, David accepts a commission to write a story that leads him into danger. As he explores the past and his mysterious publisher, David becomes a suspect in a string of murders, and his race to uncover the truth is a delicious puzzle: is he beset by demons or a demon himself? Zafón's novel is detailed and vivid, and David's narration is charming and funny, but suspect. Villain or victim, he is the hero of and the guide to this dark labyrinth that, by masterful design, remains thrilling and bewildering. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Louis Bayard Caveat lector: If you believe the only proper place for pulp is in your orange juice, then, for pity's sake, steer clear of Carlos Ruiz Zafón. In his much-loved "The Shadow of the Wind" and in this new offering, no trope of popular fiction is off limits, and nothing succeeds like excess. You will either nod approvingly when someone bangs typewriter keys until his fingers bleed or an old widow croaks, "This city is damned. Damned," or else you will strap yourself down for a minimalist drip of Raymond Carver and Ann Beattie. Word magic is Zafón's subject and also his MO, and he's not particular about where he finds it. The hero of "The Angel's Game" is a penurious young author named David Martín, who spends his days churning out Grand Guignol penny dreadfuls. His one true love, Cristina, has been claimed by David's mentor, the rakish Don Pedro Vidal, who dwells in a grand villa in the hills. David, by contrast, molders in a gloomy, funky-smelling tower in Barcelona's oldest and darkest quarter. He's being bled dry by his publishers, he has almost no friends and no life to speak of. Did I mention he's got terminal brain cancer? Along comes Andreas Corelli, a suave Parisian with an enticing offer: He will give David 100,000 francs to write a book or, more precisely, "create a religion." A year's work, and David will be free and clear. Or will he? Our hero is a little slow on the uptake, but the alert reader will note that Corelli has icy cold lips and the leer of a jackal and a taste for midnight meetings and chiaroscuro compositions. He neither ages nor blinks, and his estate is guarded by a trio of dogs, presumably descendants of the three-headed Cerberus. "You and I, my friend, are going to do great things together," promises Corelli. Sure enough, David's health takes an immediate change for the better, the nasty publishers who've been keeping him on slave wages die in a convenient fire, and even the lovely Cristina shows signs of wanting to return. If David can just finish that book he's contracted to write, he might finally taste happiness. And if you think I've given away too much of the story, please know that it's just beginning and that you are in exceptionally good hands the whole way. Zafón can write up a storm. In fact, he can write up all sorts of storms: rain, ice, fire. It's hard, really, to find anything missing from his arsenal: zesty atmosphere, crackling dialogue, arresting epigrams ("Theory is the practice of the impotent. . . . Sooner or later, the word becomes flesh and the flesh bleeds.") Plus a lively troupe of players, notably Isabella, the shopkeeper's daughter who barges her way into David's house and our affections. Best of all: 1920s Barcelona, a city whose blend of old-world rot and modernist aspiration makes it ideally suited to the author's purposes. Zafón gets full mileage from the brothels and Gothic piles and numberless necropolises and mausoleums, and for good measure, he devises a resting place all his own: an underground Cemetery of Forgotten Books, where visitors are encouraged to adopt some obscure tome and keep it alive for future generations. It's safe to say "The Angel's Game" won't be forgotten anytime soon, if only because it offers such a glut of reading pleasure. Only a churl -- that is, a reviewer -- would ask himself: At what point does excess become excessive? For me, the question arose somewhere after the 12th or 13th corpse. I couldn't quite figure out why all these people were dying in such hyperbolic fashion. (Something to do with curses and imprisoned souls and the Witch of Somorrostro.) More worrisomely, I couldn't figure out what stake I had in any of it. The leads are partly to blame -- David's a bit of a downer, and Cristina's a simp -- and the book's postlude, intended to evoke love's timelessness, succeeds only in being creepy. Without that secure emotional infrastructure, the chinks in Zafón's edifice gape a little wider. Why does David wait the length of a whole chapter before reading an urgent letter from his mistress? And what's with the long and frankly tedious philosophical debates between David and Corelli? And why does someone with a satanically guaranteed life span worry about being killed? And in a book so rife with texts, why is there not a single passage from the book David has contracted to write? Come to think of it, why does the Devil need a ghostwriter in the first place? Perhaps he is just, like Zafón, a sucker for the printed word. "Every book, every volume you see, has a soul," intones Barcelona's caretaker of forgotten books. "The soul of the person who wrote it and the soul of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens." I gently beg to differ. Not every book has a soul; not every book cries out to be remembered. As for the spirit of literature growing and strengthening . . . well, to quote another fictional sojourner in 1920s Spain: "Isn't it pretty to think so?" In the end, we are best advised to treat "The Angel's Game" as a dream from which it would be imprudent to awake. But it's nice while it lasts.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.