A young woman discovers her father's hidden trove of letters hinting that the historical Dracula, Vlad the Impaler, still exists, and follows a decades-spanning trail of scholars, archives, and vampire lore across Cold War-era Europe to find him.
Books mentioned in The Historian (8)
Dracula by Bram Stoker: ““Dracula, by Bram Stoker.” “Just a minute, please; I’ll see if it’s in.” She thumbed through a little box, her face expressionless.”
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens: “My father came home early for dinner that night and read aloud to me from Great Expectations.”
Much Ado about Nothing by William Shakespeare: “‘Yes, very old.’ He handed me a nineteenth-century edition of Much Ado About Nothing—cheap looking, bound in worn cloth.”
The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli: “It turned out to be an early edition of Machiavelli: The Prince, accompanied by a series of discourses on morality I’d never before seen or even heard of.”
The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James: “she stepped in automatically when I encountered Madame Merle, the personable schemer in Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady.”
The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope: ““Dear me,” Hedges murmured. “Pope and the alliterative. Sweet nymph. For argument.” ... “‘The Rape of the Lock,’” Hedges said politely. “Without a doubt.””
Mein Kampf by Adolph Hitler: “There was a dog-eared first edition of Mein Kampf and a diary in French—handwritten, spotted here and there with brown mould.”
Historia Turco-Byzantina by Michael Doukas: “It was a remarkable find, I thought then, although I know now what a basic source it is for fifteenth-century Byzantine history—a translation of Michael Doukas’s Istoria Turco-Bizantina.”