Dracula Novel Earns $2M Advance

First-time Novelist Hits Jackpot With Long, Mysterious Dracula Saga

(AP)  "The Historian" begins with the 16-year-old daughter of a diplomat accidentally discovering relics of her father's secret past in their Amsterdam home. When she questions him, he begins telling her the story of his Dracula quest bit by bit as they travel around Europe.

The plot soon evolves into multiple stories within stories, following the daughter, father and previous generations on their own pieces of a single quest that spans from the 1930s through the 1970s. The novel jumps around in place as well as time, taking readers from an American university town to Istanbul to remote villages in Hungary and Romania. Nearly all the international settings in the book are places Kostova knows well. The novel offers rich description of many of them, down to linguistic mannerisms and cuisine.

Beyond Dracula and international travel, the book features another important element of the author's childhood — libraries. The characters' quest finds them exploring university stacks, musty national archives and personal collections.

Growing up in upstate New York, Indiana, Tennessee and North Carolina, Kostova made frequent trips to public libraries with her sisters. Her mother would let each child take out 30 books at a time, and they lugged them home in paper bags and baskets.

The girls had a special shelf in the house for library books. "I just remember pulling a book a day off that shelf and what a joy it was," Kostova says.

In the years between her first encounters with Dracula tales and the genesis of "The Historian," Eastern Europe remained a constant theme in her life. She grew up listening to LPs of Balkan village music that her parents acquired during their sojourn in Slovenia. She pursued that interest further as an undergraduate at Yale University, where she sang in and later directed a Slavic chorus.

That involvement led her and some friends to spend a year after graduation in Eastern Europe recording the music of local singers in villages in Bulgaria and Bosnia. Their collection is to be transferred to the Library of Congress, Kostova says.

The 1989-1990 trip coincided with the collapse of the Berlin Wall. That timing afforded Kostova a glimpse of the communist era, during which most of the novel takes place. It was also the trip on which she met her Bulgarian husband, Georgi Kostov, now a computer systems administrator at the University of Michigan. Perhaps not coincidentally, "The Historian" features several cross-cultural romances.

Kostova wrote most of "The Historian" while teaching English as a second language, creative writing and composition at various Philadelphia universities. She completed the last two years of work on the book in Ann Arbor, where she earned a masters of fine arts in creative writing at Michigan.

Writer Eileen Pollack, one of Kostova's teachers at Michigan, said she immediately saw the potential in Kostova's manuscript, but knew it would require painstaking revisions.

"She was trying to do something so complicated in terms of content, style and form. Nobody, least of all a novice, was going to get it right the first time," Pollack said.

But Kostova never flinched when she told her how much more work was still required, Pollack said. "A much younger writer would just have given up at that point," she said.

Kostova says her book's large advance will allow her to devote more time to writing than she had expected. Though the editing process and publicity for "The Historian" have taken up most of her time over the past year, she has made a point of starting a new book. It, too, involves history, but that's all she will say.