The Historian

A girl finds an old book and a packet of letters in her father's library, all addressed to "My dear and unfortunate successor." Then her father starts telling her why he stopped reading them.

Shelf note: Our favorite long book for autumn. Save it for evenings with a lamp and a pot of tea.

The book is blank except for a woodcut of a dragon at its center. The letters describe a search that has consumed three generations of scholars: a search for a grave that may not be empty, for a man who died in 1476 and may not have stayed dead.

Kostova's debut moves between Cold War Eastern Europe, the monasteries of Bulgaria and Turkey, and the archives of Oxford and Istanbul, following a trail of documents that each researcher pays dearly for finding. It's a vampire novel that takes the historical record seriously, with the real Vlad Ţepeş, the actual monastic sources, and the genuine difficulty of tracing a fifteenth-century body.

The pleasure here is procedural. These are people who hunt Dracula through footnotes and manuscript catalogs, and the dread accumulates in the reading rooms.

Details

• Author: Elizabeth Kostova
• Format: Paperback
• ISBN: 9780316070638
• Genre: Historical fiction, gothic, literary thriller