Marina
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4.7 • 9 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
This haunting gothic mystery from Carlos Ruiz Zafon has long been a cult classic in Spain and is now an international bestseller. "We all have a secret buried under lock and key in the attic of our soul. This is mine." Fifteen-year-old Oscar Drai meets the strange Marina while he's out exploring an old quarter of Barcelona. She leads Oscar to a cemetery, where they watch a macabre ritual that occurs on the last Sunday of each month. At exactly 10 o'clock in the morning, a woman shrouded in a black velvet cloak descends from her carriage to place a single rose on an unmarked grave. When Oscar and Marina decide to follow her, they begin a journey that transports them to a forgotten postwar Barcelona—a world of aristocrats and actresses, inventors and tycoons—and reveals a dark secret that lies waiting in the mysterious labyrinth beneath the city streets.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In a novel first published in Spain in 1999, Zaf n (The Midnight Palace) transports readers to 1979 Barcelona, where 15-year-old Oscar Drai lives a dreary boarding school life. That's until he meets a girl named Marina, who takes him to an old cemetery where a cloaked woman conducts an odd ritual over a nameless grave. Soon they uncover a twisted tale of hereditary disease, murder, and horrible experiments, all of which took place years ago and whose central figures are dead. Or are they? Zaf n is a master of both the subtle simile ("A strange sound throbbed in the darkness. A metallic murmur, like the sound of a venetian blind quivering") and the outrageous image: "The light filtering down from above revealed the face of a harlequin. Two diamond shapes covered its glassy eyes, and steel fangs protruded from its lips of polished wood." On a rational level, the tale, like many Gothic thrillers, is preposterous, but readers are never given time to think rationally. Unlikely discoveries in mysterious, half-ruined mansions alternate with spine-tingling action sequences to create a grotesquerie that will delight horror fans. Ages 12 up.
