The Historian

The Historian is a novel by the American writer Elizabeth Kostova, published in 2005 and her first book. It blends the history of Vlad the Impaler with the Dracula legend, and it is told through letters, documents and the narrator's own recollections rather than straight narration.

The narrator is a teenage girl living in Amsterdam with her father, a diplomat and historian. Exploring his library, she finds an old book of blank pages and a bundle of letters bearing the same salutation — "My dear and unfortunate successor" — which points to a search that began long before either of them was born.

Following the letters draws her into her father's past and into her mother's disappearance, and across Europe to archives, monasteries and the places associated with Vlad Tepes. The trail leads to a centuries-long quest to find and destroy a figure that has been called a vampire but is presented as something older.

Kostova worked on the book for about a decade before it appeared. It is a standalone novel, and it draws deliberately on the Victorian tradition, borrowing the epistolary and travel forms of nineteenth-century fiction.