Pandora

Pandora is Anne Rice's 1998 entry in New Tales of the Vampires, a companion strand to The Vampire Chronicles. In a crowded present-day Paris café, the vampire scholar David Talbot meets the two-thousand-year-old Pandora — the first vampire ever made by the ancient Marius — and persuades her, reluctant at first, to set down the story of her life in a set of notebooks.

Pandora's memoir carries the novel from Imperial Rome, where she is born a senator's mortal daughter in the age of Caesar Augustus and falls in love with the still-mortal Marius, through a conspiracy that forces her to flee the city, to the port of Antioch, where she is reunited with a now-immortal Marius and receives the Dark Gift from him. From there her account moves through eighteenth-century France and into twentieth-century Paris and New Orleans.

Told in a restrained, introspective register with little of the eroticism of Rice's earlier vampire novels, Pandora is a melancholic meditation on immortality as a burden rather than a gift, and on a centuries-long, largely doomed love. It rewards readers already familiar with the wider Vampire Chronicles universe.