Published in Spain as a novel for young adults in 1993, eight years before Ruiz Zafón's The Shadow of the Wind, this story clearly foreshadows that novel's mesmerising, chilling quality.

In 1943 a Jewish family escape their city to an old house by the sea. But greater dangers lurk in the sinister and nebulous figure of the Prince of Mist, who wreaks revenge for old grievances through Max, his sisters and his new-found friend.

With present and past entangled with the real and the unreal, it makes astonishingly cinematic listening, its sophisticated mystery heightened by the narration.