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1945. Barcelone se réveille après neuf années de guerre. Dans une ruelle étroite, deux silhouettes émergent au petit jour. Un père, libraire, et son fils de 10 ans s'en vont sacrifier à un rituel centenaire. Bientôt, le Cimetière des livres oubliés leur ouvrira ses portes. Parmi les fantômes et les rayonnages, le jeune Daniel choisira un volume, un seul. Ce sera L'Ombre du vent. Dès lors, la recherche de son auteur, Julián Carax, obsédera Daniel jusqu'à façonner le cours de son existence...

This final volume in the trilogy returns readers to Inkworld and its wide cast of characters. Under the rule of the evil Adderhead, it is a bleak and dangerous place. General gloominess bogs down the pace initially, as several characters agonize, sometimes tiresomely, over past regrets and the dire uncertainty of the future. Meggie, despite her gift of magical reading, remains a disappointingly dull protagonist, but other characters are quite compelling. Her bookbinding father, for instance, emerges as a swashbuckling outlaw, and, when he brings the fire-dancer Dustfinger back from the dead, things get really interesting. The assortment of villains is vivid and frightening, especially Mortola, who can change shape, and the immortal Adderhead. Even more intriguing is Mo, who evolves into a powerful and complex scoundrel as he explores the evil potential of his unique ability to make up stories, then read them into reality. The finale includes a thoroughly engrossing climax as the Adderhead and Mo meet their doom, though a subplot involving Meggie and her companions is less exciting. [editor summary]

This sequel begins a year after the conclusion of Funke's popular Inkheart (Scholastic, 2003). In this fantasy world, certain readers have the power to bring characters out of books–and send them back. Meggie and Farid, apprentices to the fire-eater Dustfinger, follow him to the Inkworld, the land of the book-within-a-book, Inkheart, after he has been read back into its story by a mysterious man named Orpheus. Orpheus uses his powers to read Mortola and Basta, some of the villains of the first volume, into the story, along with Meggie's parents. In Inkworld, Meggie enlists the help of Fenoglio, the original author of Inkheart, to help create a new future for her parents and herself as palace intrigues, war, and the Silver Prince threaten. The story moves along at a rapid pace, from Farid and Dustfinger's original meeting with Orpheus to Farid's warning of Mortola's return to the shift of action to the Inkworld and the heightening conflict in both worlds. [editor summary]

Imagine it were possible to bring the characters from a book to life. Not like when you listen to an audiobook with such enchantment that the characters seem to jump off the pages and into your bedroom...but for real. Imagine they could actually climb out of the pages and into our world. Then, imagine if those characters brought their world into ours. This is the story of young Meggie, who lives a quiet life alone with her father Mo, a bookbinder, until one cruel night when Mo reads aloud from Inkheart and an evil ruler named Capricorn escapes the boundaries of fiction and lands in their living room. Suddenly, Meggie is smack in the middle of the kind of adventure she has only read about in books. Somehow, Meggie and Mo must learn to harness the magic that conjured this nightmare. Somehow they must change the course of the story that has changed their lives forever. This is Inkheart, a timeless tale about books, about imagination, about life. [editor sumamry]