The Shadow Land
Elizabeth Kostova, 2017
Random House
496 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780345527868
Summary
From the #1 bestselling author of The Historian comes a mesmerizing novel that spans the past and the present—and unearths the troubled history of a gorgeous but haunted country.
A young American woman, Alexandra Boyd, has traveled to Sofia, Bulgaria, hoping that life abroad will salve the wounds left by the loss of her beloved brother.
Soon after arriving in this elegant East European city, however, she helps an elderly couple into a taxi—and realizes too late that she has accidentally kept one of their bags. Inside she finds an ornately carved wooden box engraved with a name: Stoyan Lazarov.
Raising the hinged lid, she discovers that she is holding an urn filled with human ashes.
As Alexandra sets out to locate the family and return this precious item, she will first have to uncover the secrets of a talented musician who was shattered by political oppression—and she will find out all too quickly that this knowledge is fraught with its own danger.
Elizabeth Kostova’s new novel is a tale of immense scope that delves into the horrors of a century and traverses the culture and landscape of this mysterious country. Suspenseful and beautifully written, it explores the power of stories, the pull of the past, and the hope and meaning that can sometimes be found in the aftermath of loss. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—December 26, 1964
• Where—New London, Connecticut, USA
• Rasied—Knoxville, Tennessee
• Education—B.A., Yale; M.F.A. University of Michigan
• Awards—Hopwod Award for Novel-in-Progress; Quill Award; Book Sense Award
• Currently—lives in Michigan, USA
Elizabeth Johnson Kostova, an American author, is best known for her debut novel The Historian. Swan Thieves, her second novel, was released in 2010.
Kostova's interest in the Dracula legend began with the stories her father told her about the vampire when she was a child. The family lived in Ljubljana, Slovenia in 1972, while her father was teaching at a local university; during that year, the family traveled across Europe. According to Kostova, "It was the formative experience of my childhood."She "was fascinated by [her father's Dracula stories] because they were...from history in a way, even though they weren't about real history, but I heard them in these beautiful historic places." Kostova's interest in books and libraries began early as well. Her mother, a librarian, frequently took her and her sisters to the public library — they were each allowed to check out 30 books and had a special shelf for their library books.
As a child, she listened to recordings of Balkan folk music and became interested in the tradition. As an undergraduate at Yale, she sang in and directed a Slavic chorus. In 1989, she and some friends traveled to Eastern Europe, specifically Bulgaria and Bosnia, to study local musical customs. The recordings they made will be deposited in the Library of Congress. While Kostova was in Europe, the Berlin Wall collapsed, heralding the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, events which shaped her understanding of history.
Five years later, in 1994, when Kostova was hiking in the Appalachian Mountains with her husband, she had a flashback to those storytelling moments with her father and asked herself "what if the father were spinning his Dracula tales to his entranced daughter and Dracula was listening in? What if Dracula was still alive?" She immediately scratched out seven pages of notes into her writer's notebook. Two days later, she started work on the novel. At the time she was teaching English as a second language, creative writing, and composition classes at universities in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She then moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, and finished the book as she was obtaining her Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Michigan. In order to write the book, she did extensive research about Eastern Europe and Vlad Tepes.
Kostova finished the novel in January 2004 and sent it out to a potential literary agent in March. Two months later and within two days of sending out her manuscript to publishers, Kostova was offered a deal—she refused it. The rights to the book were then auctioned off and Little, Brown and Company bought it for US$2 million (US$30,000 is typical for a first novel from an unknown author). Publishers Weekly explained the high price as a bidding war between firms believing that they might have the next Da Vinci Code within their grasp. One vice-president and associate publisher said "Given the success of The Da Vinci Code, everybody around town knows how popular the combination of thriller and history can be and what a phenomenon it can become." Little, Brown, and Co. subsequently sold the rights in 28 countries. The book was published in the United States on 14 June 2005.
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The novel blends the history and folklore of Vlad Tepes and his fictional equivalent Count Dracula and has been described as a combination of genres, including Gothic novel, adventure novel, detective fiction, travelogue, postmodern historical novel, epistolary epic, and historical thriller. Kostova was intent on writing a serious work of literature and saw herself as an inheritor of the Victorian style. Although based on Bram Stoker's Dracula, The Historian is not a horror novel, but rather an eerie tale. The novel is concerned with questions about history, its role in society, and how it is represented in books, as well as the nature of good and evil. As Kostova explains, "Dracula is a metaphor for the evil that is so hard to undo in history." The evils brought about by religious conflict are a particular theme and the novel explores the relationship between the Christian West and the Islamic East.
Heavily promoted, the book became the first debut novel to land at number one on the the New York Times bestseller list and as of 2005 was the fastest-selling hardback debut novel in US history. In general, the reviews of the novel were mixed. Several reviewers noted that she described the setting of her novel well. However, some reviewers criticized the book's structure and its lack of tonal variety. Kostova received the 2006 Book Sense award for Best Adult Fiction and the 2005 Quill Award for Debut Author of the Year. Sony bought the film rights to the novel for $1.5 million.
In May 2007, the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation was created. The Foundation helps support Bulgarian creative writing, the translation of contemporary Bulgarian literature into English, and friendship between Bulgarian authors and American and British authors.
Kostova's second novel, The Swan Thieves, was released in 2010, and The Shadow Land in 2017. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
A compelling and complex mystery, strong storytelling, and lyrical writing combine for an engrossing read.… Lazarov’s… attempt to become a concertmaster… has tragic consequences, setting up Kostova’s most emotional and harrowing moments.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) This…will delight the author's fans. A slight hint of the mystical will appeal to readers who enjoyed Deborah Harkness's "All Souls" trilogy, while the mystery and thriller aspects will keep fans… reading. A fantastic book club pick. —Elizabeth McArthur, Bexar Cty. Digital Lib., BiblioTech, San Antonio
Library Journal
Interweaving tales juxtapose the past with the present as the mystery unfolds. Verdict: Those who enjoy a deep dive into the complicated lives of people both historical and contemporary will love this book. —Connie Williams, Petaluma High School, CA
School Library Journal
[T]he romance Kostova drums up for Alexandra …feel[s] shoehorned into the novel…. Kostova's passion and tragic sense of history, along with jewellike character studies, almost make up for the overplotting and repetitiveness as she drums her points home.
Kirkus Reviews
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