Accordingly, there is a real liveliness about the book, even as we acknowledge his sources and catch the whiffs and echoes of other authors: this is a big patchwork quilt of a novel with strong themes. It has been a huge success in Europe, particularly in Zafon's Spain, where it was first published in 2001. It comes to the English market in a clear, colourful translation by Lucia Graves, daughter of Robert Graves. It is Zafon's fifth book, his first for adults. It's no bad thing that his previous efforts have been for young people: writers for the young have to be very disciplined about things such as plot and meaning and keeping things cracking along. The story is set in the Barcelona of the Spanish Civil War and its long aftermath up to the mid-1960s. It begins with 10-year-old Daniel Sempere being taken by his father to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a secret, mysterious labyrinth visited and maintained by Barcelona's second-hand booksellers. Democracies have national libraries that preserve a copy of every book published, but 1930s Barcelona, riven by censorship and political repression, needs subversives to preserve its humane ideas.

Daniel's father tells him that he must adopt a book and keep its spirit alive. Zafon's plea for reading here is a tad schoolteacherish: "Between the covers of each of those books lay a boundless universe waiting to be discovered, while beyond those walls, in the outside world, people allowed life to pass by in afternoons of football and radio soaps, content to do little more than gaze at their navels." Add television, the internet and computer games to that and then state the obvious - Zafon challenges his readers to adopt a book, any book, themselves. Later in the novel he risks putting prophetic words into the mouth of one character, Fermin Romero de Torres, concerning the terrible effects of television: "After only three or four generations, people will no longer even know how to fart on their own." We won't die of the bomb, says Fermin, but of banality. The story is so engrossing at this point that one forgives Zafon his little rant.

Daniel's copy of The Shadow of the Wind is the last one extant; someone is determined to destroy all the copies. His adoption of the book brings him into perilous contact with other stories. His own life story intersects with that of Julian Carax, the mysterious author of the book, who has vanished. Zafon chooses a first-person narrative but varies the voices. Different characters tell the story from their perspectives. At times you wonder about the length of personal letters and the overall impression is of an onion-skin peeling downwards to a series of revelations.

This works extremely well when the narrator has a vivid, strong voice, such as Fermin Romero de Torres: a very Dickensian comic stalwart in the way of Samuel Weller and Wilkins Micawber, though his bawdiness belongs in a less straitlaced era; a touch of Rabelais, certainly. The name's resonance is lost on non-Spanish speakers, although there is important business in the book concerning its vulgar grandiosity: it sounds like a bullfighter's nom de guerre. Fermin's grottiness, his loyalty, his everymannish combination of courage and cunning are hugely enjoyable. Daniel, the main character and main narrator, is less lively, although he has subtleties. He has weaknesses of judgement a la Pip or David Copperfield; the very special pen that his father gives him becomes a kind of symbol of something rich and valuable and unused. But he survives others' obsessions like an Ishmael.

This is not to say the novel is limited, derivative or old-fashioned. Zafon has earned a firm place in the underpopulated canon of exuberant storytellers, writers who are driven by rich delight in tale-spinning rather than literary fadderies (if only Umberto Eco's subsequent novels had been more like his first!). Zafon is as fascinated by the act of reading as any cultural studies slave; the difference is that he makes it fascinating for us, too.