000			02577cam a22002894a 4500
001			13730921
005			20240611175434.0
008			040927s2005 nyub 000 1 eng
010			_a 2004022563
020			_a9780751537291
040			_aDLC _beng _cDLC _dDLC
042			_apcc
050	0	0	_aPS3611.O74927 _bH57 2005
100	1		_aKostova, Elizabeth.
245	1	4	_aThe historian _b: a novel _c/ Elizabeth Kostova.
250			_a1st ed.
260			_aLondon : Time Warner Books, 2005.
300			_a710 pages : illustrations ; 17 cm
520			_aIf 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.
650		0	_aVampires _vFiction.
650		0	_aMystery and intrigue _922662
655		7	_aOccult fiction. _2gsafd
655		7	_aHorror fiction. _2gsafd
942			_2lcc
999			_c3943 _d3943
041			_aEnglish
653			_aREADING IN ENGLISH