That book taught me that by reading, I could live more intensely. It could give me back the sight I had lost. For that reason alone, a book that didn't matter to anyone changed my life.

All I know is that once Julián told the kids in the building that he had a sister only he could see. He said she came out of mirrors as if she were made of thin air and that she lived with Satan himself in a palace at the bottom of a lake.

I couldn't help thinking that if I, by pure chance, had found a whole universe in a single unknown book, buried in that endless necropolis, tens of thousands more would remain unexplored, forgotten forever. I felt myself surrounded by millions of abandoned pages, by worlds and souls without an owner sinking in an ocean of darkness, while the world that throbbed outside the library seemed to be losing its memory, day after day, unknowingly, feeling all the wiser the more it forgot.

I stepped into the bookshop and breathed in that perfume of paper and magic that strangely no one had ever thought of bottling.

Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened.

Well, this is a story about books." About books?" About accursed books, about a man who wrote them, about a character who broke out of the pages of anovel so that he could burn it, about a betrayal and a lost friendship. It's a story of love, of hatred, and of the dreams that live in the shadow of the wind." You talk like the jacket blurb of a Victorian novel, Daniel." That's probably because I work in a bookshop and I've seen too many. But this is a true story.

Our world will not die as the result of the bomb, as the papers say, it will die of laughter, of banality, or making a joke of everything, and a lousy joke at that.