After Ann Godoff's storied departure from Random House, the U.S. publishing world has waited to see what she and her crew would do at her new Penguin Press imprint. The sole novel on the imprint's first list is a translation of Carlos Ruiz Zafón's acclaimed La sombra del viento (The Shadow of the Wind, Críticas, May/June 2002), to be published in English in April 2004. The choice firmly places Ruiz Zafón among the authors to watch in any language and points to the crossover potential of Spanish-language writers in today's increasingly international market.

Planeta has seen excellent sales and critical support for Ruiz Zafón's postwar saga, but if the sales in English follow the pace in Spanish, Penguin may find the book has a slow build. According to Planeta's U.S. sales director Marla Norman, the Premio Fernando Lara finalist (2001) was published in May 2002 and distributed in Spain with modest sales. Its life became apparent, "as more people read the book," she says. "It began to take off simply through word of mouth. To date, the book has sold more than 200,000 copies in hardcover. "

Those are excellent numbers anywhere, according to Penguin Press senior editor Scott Moyers, who acquired the book when he was at Random House and brought it along to Penguin Press. However, the numbers weren't decisive in turning Penguin's head. "The fact that it had been such a runaway word-of-mouth success in Spain was quite heartening, and the other foreign sales were heartening too," he tells Críticas. "And it would give me a pause if a novel I was thinking of publishing in translation hadn't made any noise at all, critically or commercially. But, of course, some bestsellers travel and others don't."

The pitch to publish the novel came to Moyers through the agent Thomas Colchie, who specializes in international literature and is also a translator, with Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman to his credit. Colchie had only the Spanish hardcover sales figures and reviews (many in Spanish) to hand-sell with. At the time, however, Moyers's assistant, Maria Schneider, had some Spanish skills, having studied the language in college and having lived in Madrid. Schneider could evaluate the book. "When she wrote a passionate two-page cri de coeur of a manuscript report explaining that the reading experience had reached so deeply into her heart and mind," Moyers recalls, he and Godoff decided to preempt.

"What I saw here was a story whose key elements had universal resonance," Moyers says, "but the author had made them his own and rooted them in a specific setting, Barcelona over the first half of the century, that's quite romantic and fascinating in itself."

The decision to publish The Shadow of the Wind does not represent a new push into the Latino market by Penguin, although it probably won't hurt that the market has become increasingly well-defined. "We want to publish wonderful writers, however they do or don't define themselves," Moyers says. "If we can identify a discrete target audience and target our marketing efforts at it, of course we will to the best of our abilities."

Penguin's decision-making process ran slightly ahead of the thinking at Planeta. "Here in the Americas very little attention was paid to the title originally," says Norman. "This past spring, we began to hear from Barcelona that the title had serious commercial and literary merit. We began making plans to publish a trade version and, here in the U.S., we toyed with the idea of doing an English version as well, since Carlos lives in L.A."

Far from disheartened, Norman sees an opportunity for the book in Spanish. "Now that Penguin has decided to do an English version," Norman adds, "we'll definitely try to coordinate with them to promote the book in both languages."