num_pages: 710
description: If your pulse flutters at the thought of castle ruins and descents into crypts by moonlight, you will savor every creepy page of Elizabeth Kostova's long but beautifully structured thriller The Historian. The story opens in Amsterdam in 1972, when a teenage girl discovers a medieval book and a cache of yellowed letters in her diplomat father's library. The pages of the book are empty except for a woodcut of a dragon. The letters are addressed to: "My dear and unfortunate successor." When the girl confronts her father, he reluctantly confesses an unsettling story: his involvement, twenty years earlier, in a search for his graduate school mentor, who disappeared from his office only moments after confiding to Paul his certainty that Dracula--Vlad the Impaler, an inventively cruel ruler of Wallachia in the mid-15th century--was still alive. The story turns out to concern our narrator directly because Paul's collaborator in the search was a fellow student named Helen Rossi (the unacknowledged daughter of his mentor) and our narrator's long-dead mother, about whom she knows almost nothing. And then her father, leaving just a note, disappears also.As well as numerous settings, both in and out of the East Bloc, Kostova has three basic story lines to keep straight--one from 1930, when Professor Bartolomew Rossi begins his dangerous research into Dracula, one from 1950, when Professor Rossi's student Paul takes up the scent, and the main narrative from 1972. The criss-crossing story lines mirror the political advances, retreats, triumphs, and losses that shaped Dracula's beleaguered homeland--sometimes with the Byzantines on top, sometimes the Ottomans, sometimes the rag-tag local tribes, or the Orthodox church, and sometimes a fresh conqueror like the Soviet Union.Although the book is appropriately suspenseful and a delight to read--even the minor characters are distinctive and vividly seen--its most powerful moments are those that describe real horrors. Our narrator recalls that after reading descriptions of Vlad burning young boys or impaling "a large family," she tried to forget the words: "For all his attention to my historical education, my father had neglected to tell me this: history's terrible moments were real. I understand now, decades later, that he could never have told me. Only history itself can convince you of such a truth." The reader, although given a satisfying ending, gets a strong enough dose of European history to temper the usual comforts of the closing words. --Regina Marler
language: English
title: The Historian
titlecomplete: The Historian
characters: Hugh James, Evá Orbán, Stephen Barley, ____ Getzi, Anton Stoichev, Vlad III, Helen Rossi, Turgut Bora, Bartholomew Rossi, Paul Ross
genres: Fiction, Historical, Gothic, Mystery, Thriller, Vampires, Horror, Paranormal, Historical Fiction, Fantasy
ratings_count: 262011
places: Budapest, Istanbul, England, Turkey, Hungary, Oxford University, Oxford, England, Netherlands, Amsterdam
awards: awardedAt: 1104566400000
name: International Horror Guild Award
category: Best Novel, awardedAt: 1041408000000
name: Hopwood Award
category: Novel in-progress, awardedAt: 1136102400000
name: Book Sense Book of the Year Award
category: Best Adult Fiction, awardedAt: 1104566400000
name: The Quill Award
category: Debut Author of the Year, awardedAt: 1136102400000
name: Lord Ruthven Award
category: Fiction
publisher: Little, Brown Book Group