Carlos Ruiz Zafon was born in Barcelona in 1964. He started his writing career with four fiction books for young adults and in 1993 was awarded the Spanish Edebé literary prize for one of them: The Prince of Mist.

His first fiction for adults and big success, The Shadow of the Wind, was published in 2002 and translated into several languages. Zafon, also a screen writer, has been living in Los Angeles since 1993, but has kept his house in Barcelona.

The Angel’s Game, published in Spanish in 2008 and in English in 2009 and translated into several other languages, is reminiscent of Zafon’s first successful novel, The Shadow of the Wind. The two books have in common the Gothic atmosphere, the world of literature which involves the love of books and the book-selling universe, plus the cemetery of forgotten books.

The story, charmingly and humorously narrated with sarcasm in parts by the leading character, David Martin, is set in Barcelona. It starts in 1917 and ends in 1945, but the main series of events take place in the 1920s.

David Martin, born into a poor family, had a tormented childhood with a violent father and a mother who abandoned him. He found solace in books and became a book-lover and an ardent reader at an early age. Later he became an acclaimed writer because of his sensational stories of the doomed citizens of Barcelona. Just like Zafon, Martin was influenced by the nineteenth century writers and especially his favourite English novelist, Charles Dickens, who portrayed destitute Londoners and wrote about the importance of reforming the society of his time.

Martin was approached by a mysterious recluse French publisher, Andreas Corelli, who made him a financial offer he couldn’t refuse. He had to write a book like no other, a book about a new religion, a book that will take hold of the populace’s heart and mind. Martin accepted the deal without suspecting that he was selling his soul to the devil, it is a Faustian bargain with all it entailed, a high price to pay. Martin finds himself going through a dark labyrinth of an eerie universe involving tragic intrigues, murders and deceptions, in a supernatural environment of mysterious adventures and unfulfilled tragic romance.

The Angel’s Game is a book about the power of books and their consequences on some people’s lives, a lyric apologia for books, book reading and book writing. It is a densely dark novel about good and evil with regard to the human soul. A highly complex plot, teeming with characters and events, evolving in a supernatural world.

Despite the lengthy and wearisome theological debates between Martin and Corelli and the disappointingly melodramatic rushed epilogue, The Angel’s Game remains an enthralling novel conceived with intensely vivid imagination. The rich, detailed description of the City of Barcelona gives some depth to the story and makes the city stand out as another character in the novel.

In one of his interviews, Zafon has mentioned that The Shadow of The Wind is about redemption and the Angel’s Game is about damnation. Then he stressed that “our choices make us who we are”. It is up to any person to decide if he wants to think for himself or if he would rather surrender to other people’s beliefs.

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Kunal Basu was born in Calcutta, India in 1956 to middle class communist parents, a publisher father, Sunil Kumar, and an author and actress mother, Chabi Basu. He studied in South Point High School in Calcutta and graduated in 1978 in Mechanical Engineering from Jadavpur University in India.

With his doctorate in hand, he taught at McGill University in Montreal in Canada from 1986 to 1999 and since 1999 he has been a professor of marketing and management studies at Oxford University in England. He was married in 1982 , has a daughter, and still lives in England.

Kunal Basu’s three acclaimed novels are: The Opium Clerk published in 2001, The Miniaturist published in 2003, and Racist published in 2006.

His most recent book, The Japanese Wife published in 2008, is a collection of short stories.

Kunal Basu, through his historical, enthralling fiction and minutely described tale, The Miniaturist, carries his readers into the exotic world of 16th century India at the time of the Mughal emperor Akbar the Great, who reigned from 1460 to 1535, and the prodigy painter Bihzad.

It’s a sumptuous tale, similar to the One Thousand and One Nights, full of harems, eunuchs, slaves, servants, luxurious palaces, kings, courtiers, love, jealousies and intrigues.

In The Miniaturist, like My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk, the reader is transported to the same era, its artistic ground and its culture, which was no doubt one of the most advanced world wide for centuries, since it yielded the most sumptuous miniature paintings in the history of art.

The main figure in this vividly portrayed tale is Bihzad the Persian, the most gifted and talented artist of his time. The story follows Bihzad from his childhood to an advanced age. The Khwaja, Bihzad’s father, brought him up as a recluse. Deprived from any education or social life which could have a corrupting influence on his art, he had to remain pure. Unfortunately, Bihzad like all geniuses is tormented; he questions himself about the true value of art and of artists. He rebels by refusing to follow in his father’s footsteps and becomes a courtier and to be like other artists a copier, his renunciation of life is most moving. Bihzad believed that a true artist must set his creative spirit free.

He wanders aimlessly on a journey of self repudiation and in the midst of his suffering the voice of his wife Zohra, the daughter of the Hazari ruler, resonates in his ears: “Your gift is your curse. Your defect. It’ll make you suffer. Even if you wanted to escape, it wouldn’t spare you. It’ll cripple you, even if you flee, it will seek its revenge”.

He inflicts on himself blindness by tying his eyes firmly in order not to relapse and paint again before he could achieve the fundamental vision that he seeks. He leads a life of a beggar, suffering and enduring in order to purge himself in the hope of reaching the Nirvana and to be at peace with the world and within himself.

The liberation comes at the end when he meets the emperor Akbar on his deathbed. Now the penniless beggar, Bihzad the wanderer, seems to have reached his destination, at last. Akbar has forgiven him and called him not an artist but a saint, because “only a saint is truly blind, seeing none but the God inside him”. Now he can unfold his eyes and draw again for posterity his beloved Akbar dying, to fulfil his emperor’s request and “turn into an artist for the last time.”