Title: The prisoner of heaven

Author: Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Yan’s pick

Barcelona, Christmas 1957, Sempere & Son’s bookshop struggles to get customers in. While the Old Sempere tries to find ways for business keep going, the son, Daniel has a strange visitor who buys a significant  antique book. More strangely the visitor does not only overpay for the book but also wants Daniel to pass this book to Fermin, whom Daniel thinks of highly and dearly.

When he gets that book with the stranger’s inscriptions on it, Fermin turns pale gravely.

The story now turns unexpectedly to 1939,Barcelona, when Fermin was jailed with hundreds people, a lot of them were as innocent as him, in a maximum security castle, by the old regime.

Fermin’s story brings back dark period in Spanish history and it also offers some continuous clues from the other two titles written by the author ‘The shadow of the wind’ and ‘The angel’s game’. This title is a sequel to the first two.

Same as his first two titles, Zafon writes it well. It is fast paced, and interwoven with the present and the past. There are the old evils from the first two books, and the new characters, such as Fermin, Daniel’s wife, are created.Barcelonain 1957 is a better place than 1939, but those who tortured the innocents are still there, worse, they are in even higher power.

Daniel’s mission to find out about her mother’s murderer/s and the injustice carried out by those in power are pretty much the focus of this book. It has every taste for mystery, suspicion, betrayal, passion, friendship and imagination