Marina

While exploring the rundown outskirts of late-1970s Barcelona, fifteen-year-old boarding school student Oscar Drai stumbles upon what appears to be an abandoned home and decides to investigate. But an unexpected encounter with its inhabitants sends him fleeing into the night with a pocket watch in his hand that doesn't belong to him. When he goes back the next day to return the watch, he discovers that the house belongs to Germán, an aging artist with a tragic past, and his frail daughter, Marina, with whom Oscar develops a close friendship. After witnessing a ghostly graveyard ritual, Oscar and Marina suddenly find themselves entangled in a series of events that had been set in motion at the turn of the twentieth century, involving an eccentric scientist and his quest to unravel the mystery of mortality through the reanimation of dead tissue, his doomed romance with a famous but damaged actress, and ultimately his descent into madness. Zafon weaves a twisted tapestry of gothic horror, quickly paced, with intricate layers of carefully crafted stories within stories; allusions to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein abound. Whether describing the pointed arches and towering spires of postwar Spanish architecture, the gruesome visage of a resurrected corpse, or the intimate moments between a lonely boy and the best friend he's falling for, Zafon's writing moves gracefully from the macabre to the poignant and back again. shara l. hardeson