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BookBrowse Reviews The Historian: Exotic locales, tantalizing history, a family legacy and a love of the bloodthirsty. 1st Novel

The Historian
by Elizabeth Kostova
Paperback, Oct 2006,
688 pages.
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From the book jacket: Late one night, exploring her father's library, a young woman finds an ancient book and a cache of yellowing letters. The letters are all addressed to "My dear and unfortunate successor," and they plunge her into a world she never dreamed of — a labyrinth where the secrets of her father's past and her mother's mysterious fate connect to an inconceivable evil hidden in the depths of history.

The letters provide links to one of the darkest powers that humanity has ever known — and to a centuries-long quest to find the source of that darkness and wipe it out. It is a quest for the truth about Vlad the Impaler, the medieval ruler whose barbarous...
Beyond the Book
Elizabeth Kostova (née Johnson) was born in New London, Connecticut in 1964, and now lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  She graduated from Yale and holds an MFA from the University of Michigan where she won the Hopwood Award for the Novel-in-Progress.  The Historian took her ten years to write, and was inspired by the vampire stories told to her by her father, a professor of urban planning, during the year they spent in Ljubljana, capital of Slovenia (where her father taught at the university) when she was seven, and as they traveled through Europe.

She says, "I wondered whether this would make a good structure for...
This review was originally published in June 2005, and has been updated for the October 2006 paperback release. Click here to go to this issue.
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