The Historian

Regular price RM32.99 MYR
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  • International Horror Guild Award Nominee for Best Novel (2005)
  • Hopwood Award for Novel in-progress (2003)
  • Book Sense Book of the Year Award for Best Adult Fiction (2006)
  • The Quill Award for Debut Author of the Year (2005)
  • Lord Ruthven Award for Fiction (2006)
Note: While we do our best to ensure the accuracy of cover images, ISBNs may at times be reused for different editions of the same title which may hence appear as a different cover.

The Historian

Regular price RM32.99 MYR
Unit price
per
ISBN: 9780316057882
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Date of Publication: 2006-01-01
Format: Paperback
Goodreads rating: 3.8
(rated by 264424 readers)

Description

Some stories can be told again in endlessly different ways. Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian combines a search for the historical Dracula with a profound sense that Stoker got some things right--that the late Mediaeval tyrant kills among us yet, undead and dangerous. From Stoker, she also takes a sense that the supernatural seems more real when embedded in documentary evidence.Three generations search for Dracula's resting place, and their stories are nested within each other, so that we know that at least two quests ended badly. Kostova rations her thrills very carefully so that we jump out of our chair at quite slight surprises, especially when we have come to expect buckets of blood and loud bangs. She also has a profound and well-communicated sense of place and period, so that the book is equally at home in 1930s Rumania, Cold War Budapest and 1970s Oxford. Kostova is particularly good on the sights and sounds of remote country places and the taste of real peasant food--this sensuous realism does not always go with her other skill, the creation of imagined documents and folksongs that feel as real and true as what might be actual.This is a quietly good book rather than a spectacular debut, with some uncomfortable twists in its tail; her heroine-narrators are, and perhaps remain, in the most serious of jeopardies.
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Similar Reads

  • International Horror Guild Award Nominee for Best Novel (2005)
  • Hopwood Award for Novel in-progress (2003)
  • Book Sense Book of the Year Award for Best Adult Fiction (2006)
  • The Quill Award for Debut Author of the Year (2005)
  • Lord Ruthven Award for Fiction (2006)
Note: While we do our best to ensure the accuracy of cover images, ISBNs may at times be reused for different editions of the same title which may hence appear as a different cover.