Elizabeth KostovaLiterary Fiction · Fiction·b. 1964
The Historian
Synopsis
In 1972, a sixteen-year-old girl finds an old book and a bundle of letters hidden in her diplomat father's study, and slowly draws out the story he has kept from her: as a young graduate student in the 1950s, he searched for his own missing mentor, a historian who had spent years convinced that Vlad Tepes -- the fifteenth-century Wallachian prince history remembers as Dracula -- never really died.
The novel moves between three generations of scholars, each drawn deeper into the same hunt across Oxford, Istanbul, Budapest and the mountains of Eastern Europe, as documents, letters and old maps lead them toward the vampire's hidden tomb.
How it reads
Prose complexity 7/10
Content warnings (2)
Graphic ViolenceChild Death