In a misty, drizzling afternoon at the Ateneo, Daniel becomes intensely infatuated with Clara Barceló, feeling marked by her touch and attention. As Daniel listens, Clara begins sharing her own connection to Julián Carax, framing it through her family’s losses and her hard-won distrust of admired people.

Clara explains that her father, a prominent lawyer tied to the Catalan president’s cabinet, sent Clara and Clara’s mother into exile in France at the start of the Civil War. He continued writing weekly letters, but the return address eventually vanished; the final letters were written in secret from a cell in Montjuïc Castle, from which Clara’s father never emerged. Clara’s mother reads the letters aloud, while Clara later has her cousin Claudette reread them so Clara can “read with borrowed eyes.”

Clara describes how, during exile, she and Claudette studied with a private tutor they nicknamed Monsieur Roquefort. On a 1929 visit to a secondhand stall outside Notre-Dame, Roquefort impulsively bought a novel by an unknown author, Julián Carax, titled The Red House. Clara recounts the book’s gothic plot about a mysterious thief who steals dolls and blinds them, and about a wealthy man’s daughter, Giselle, who falls in love with the intruder and uncovers a terrible secret tied to her father’s collection.

Roquefort is deeply moved by the novel and tries to learn more about Carax, only to be told the book sold almost nothing and remaining copies were pulped. Over the next decade he searches in vain for other Carax works, hearing only rumors of titles that may or may not exist. He later learns that a new Carax novel, The Shadow of the Wind, appeared, and then hears contradictory stories: that Carax was improving his fortunes, set to marry, and had earned a good review, but vanished after a dawn duel in Père Lachaise on his wedding day.

As legends multiply—Carax dead in an unmarked grave, fleeing scandal, or dying destitute back in Barcelona—Roquefort refuses to forget him. Years after first discovering The Red House, Roquefort lends it to the teenage Clara and Claudette, hoping its romance and darkness will finally spark their interest in reading.