In May 1980, fifteen-year-old Oscar Drai suddenly vanishes from his boarding school in Barcelona. For seven days and seven nights no one knows his whereabouts.

His story begins in an old quarter of the city, where he meets the strange Marina and her father, German Blau, a portrait painter. Marina takes Oscar to a cemetery to watch a macabre ritual that occurs on the last Sunday of each month. At exactly ten o'clock in the morning, a coach pulled by black horses appears. From it descends a woman, her face shrouded be a black velvet cloak. Holding a single rose, she walks to a gravestone that bears no name, only a mysterious emblem of a black butterfly with open wings.

When Oscar and Marina decide to follow her, they begin a journey that transports them to a forgotten, postwar Barcelona-a world of aristocrats and actresses, inventors and tycoons-and reveals a dark secret that lies waiting in the mysterious labyrinth beneath the city streets.

Written just before The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafon's Marina has long been a cult classic in Spain and is now an international bestseller.