The Angel's Game

The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon Weidenfeld & Nicolson HK$204

The Angel's Game is Carlos Ruiz Zafon's prequel to the immensely successful Shadow of the Wind, a novel that became a worldwide best-seller and was translated into more than 35 languages.

It is set in Barcelona during the 1920s, a turbulent time marked by dictatorship and the end of constitutional monarchy in Spain. The backdrop is appropriately arrayed for a noir thriller full of mean characters, a tragic hero, a doomed love and quicksand circumstances.

In the spirit of its predecessor, The Angel's Game also features Barcelona as a character in the story, a gothic organism that shifts shape and form to yield narrow alleys and desolate mansions, stifling haze and blanketing fog. With his tongue firmly in cheek, Zafon even summons Antoni Gaudi, the Catalan architect famous for his baroque buildings, and casts his residence as a set piece.

The book opens with David Martin, a 17-year-old impoverished writer working at a languishing newspaper. Brought up by an illiterate war veteran, since childhood Martin's 'only friends were made of paper and ink'; he has been assisted in his passion by the bookseller Sempere. Readers familiar with Shadow will smile at the reappearance of the delightful Sempere & Sons, a bookshop that along with the Cemetery of Forgotten Books played a stellar role in the first novel.

Martin's favourite book is a gift from Sempere, Great Expectations, and Dickens' novel runs as a motif through The Angel's Game. Much like Pip, Martin has a rich benefactor in Pedro Vidal, star writer and scion of a wealthy family; his Estella is the glacial Christina, alternately aloof and approachable.