This beautifully nuanced memoir is a profound meditation on the three cultures-Spanish, English, and Catalan-that have shaped Lucia Graves's life and thought. It is also a complex portrait of Spain under Franco. The author explores the patterns of love, sacrifice, and forbearance that mark not only her own life but those of many other Spanish women she has known.

Barcelona, 1945--just after the war, a great world city lies in shadow, nursing its wounds, and a boy named Daniel awakes on his eleventh birthday to find that he can no longer remember his mother's face. To console his only child, Daniel's widowed father, an antiquarian book dealer, initiates him into the secret of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a library tended by Barcelona's guild of rare-book dealers as a repository for books forgotten by the world, waiting for someone who will care about them again. Daniel's father coaxes him to choose a volume from the spiraling labyrinth of shelves,...