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By Elizabeth
Kostova
Fiction,
Horror
Back
Bay Books
Paperback,
676 pages
October
2006
$15.99
0316154547
Also
available as a Hachette Audio, eBook and Large Print Edition
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“To you, perceptive reader, I bequeath
my history...”
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 reign formed the basis
of the legend of Dracula. Generations of historians have risked
their reputations, their sanity, and even their lives to learn
the truth about Vlad the Impaler and Dracula. Now one young
woman must decide whether to take up this quest herself—to
follow her father in a hunt that nearly brought him to ruin
years ago, when he was a vibrant young scholar and her mother
was still alive.
What does the legend of Vlad the Impaler
have to do with the modern world? Is it possible that the
Dracula of myth truly existed—and that he has lived on,
century after century, pursuing his own unknowable ends? The
answers to these questions cross time and borders, as first
the father and then the daughter search for clues, from dusty
Ivy League libraries to Istanbul, Budapest, and the depths
of Eastern Europe. In city after city, in monasteries and
archives, in letters and in secret conversations, the horrible
truth emerges about Vlad the Impaler's dark reign—and
about a time-defying pact that may have kept his awful work
alive down through the ages.
Parsing obscure signs and hidden texts,
reading codes worked into the fabric of medieval monastic
traditions—and evading the unknown adversaries who will
go to any lengths to conceal and protect Vlad's ancient powers—one
woman comes ever closer to the secret of her own past and
a confrontation with the very definition of evil. Elizabeth
Kostova's debut novel is an adventure of monumental proportions,
a relentless tale that blends fact and fantasy, history and
the present, with an assurance that is almost unbearably suspenseful—and
utterly unforgettable.
Elizabeth Kostova graduated
from Yale and holds an MFA from the University of Michigan,
where she won the Hopwood Award for the Novel-in-Progress.
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