The Midnight Palace

The Midnight Palace

by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The Midnight Palace

The Midnight Palace

by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Paperback

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Overview

A dark mystery lurks in the heart of Calcutta in this young adult novel from bestselling author Carlos Ruiz Zafón, translated from the original Spanish by acclaimed translator Lucia Graves.

Set in Calcutta in the 1930s, The Midnight Palace begins on a dark night when an English lieutenant fights to save newborn twins Ben and Sheere from an unthinkable threat. Despite monsoon-force rains and terrible danger lurking around every street corner, the young lieutenant manages to get them to safety, but not without losing his own life...

Years later, on the eve of Ben and Sheere's sixteenth birthday, the mysterious threat reenters their lives. This time, it may be impossible to escape. With the help of their brave friends, the twins must take a stand against the terror that watches them in the shadows of the night—and face the most frightening creature in the history of the City of Palaces.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780316044745
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Publication date: 04/10/2012
Pages: 320
Sales rank: 447,044
Product dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.90(d)
Lexile: 1030L (what's this?)
Age Range: 12 - 17 Years

About the Author

Carlos Ruiz Zafón is the author of seven novels, including the New York Times bestseller The Prince of Mist and the international phenomena The Shadow of the Wind and The Angel's Game. His work has been published in more than fifty countries and honored with numerous awards.

Read an Excerpt

The Midnight Palace


By Zafon, Carlos Ruiz

Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Copyright © 2011 Zafon, Carlos Ruiz
All right reserved.

ISBN: 9780316044738

I’LL NEVER FORGET the night it snowed over Calcutta. The calendar at St. Patrick’s Orphanage was inching toward the final days of May 1932, leaving behind one of the hottest months ever recorded in the city of palaces.

With each passing day we felt sadder and more fearful of the approaching summer, when we would all turn sixteen, for this would mean our separation and the end of the Chowbar Society, the secret club of seven members that had been our refuge during our years at the orphanage. We had grown up there with no other family than ourselves, with no other memories than the stories we told in the small hours around an open fire in the courtyard of an abandoned mansion—a large, rambling ruin that stood on the corner of Cotton Street and Brabourne Road and which we’d christened the Midnight Palace. At the time, I didn’t know I would never again see the streets of my childhood, the city whose spell has haunted me to this day.

I have never returned to Calcutta, but I have always been true to the promise we all made to ourselves on the banks of the Hooghly River: the promise never to forget what we had witnessed. Time has taught me to treasure the memory of those days and to preserve the letters I received from the accursed city, for they keep the flame of my memories alive. It was through those letters that I found out our palace had been demolished and an office building erected over its ashes; and that Mr. Thomas Carter, the head of St. Patrick’s, had passed away after spending the last years of his life in darkness, following the fire that closed his eyes forever.

As the years went by, I heard about the gradual disappearance of all the sites that had formed the backdrop to our lives. The fury of a city that seemed to be devouring itself and the deceptive passage of time eventually erased all traces of the Chowbar Society and its members, at which point I began to fear that this story might be lost forever for want of a narrator.

The vagaries of fate have chosen me, the person least suited to the task, to tell the tale and unveil the secret that both bonded and separated us so many years ago in the old railway station of Jheeter’s Gate. I would have preferred someone else to have been in charge of rescuing this story, but once again life has taught me that my role is to be a witness, not the leading actor.

All these years I’ve kept the few letters sent to me by Roshan, guarding them closely because they shed light on the fate of each member of our unique society; I’ve read them over and over again, aloud, in the solitude of my study. Perhaps because I somehow felt that I had unwittingly become the repository of everything that had happened to us. Perhaps because I understood that, among that group of seven young people, I was always the most reluctant to take risks, the least daring, and therefore the most likely to survive.

In that spirit, and trusting that my memory won’t betray me, I will try to relive the mysterious and terrible events that took place during those four blazing days in May 1932.

It will not be easy, and I beg my readers to forgive my inadequate words as I attempt to salvage that dark Calcutta summer from the past. I have done my best to reconstruct the truth, to return to those troubled days that would inevitably shape our future. All that is left for me now is to take my leave and allow the facts to speak for themselves.

I’ll never forget the fear on the faces of my friends the night it snowed in Calcutta. But, as Ben used to tell me, the best place to start a story is at the beginning….



Continues...

Excerpted from The Midnight Palace by Zafon, Carlos Ruiz Copyright © 2011 by Zafon, Carlos Ruiz. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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