Books By Elizabeth Kostova - Author

When I was a little girl, my father--a professor--took his young family to Eastern Europe on a fellowship. We traveled in Eastern and Western Europe, and along the way he amused me with a series of pleasantly creepy tales about Dracula. His stories were based on the classic Dracula films he'd grown up on. I loved these stories, and because of them Dracula has always been associated for me with travel and with beautiful historic places in the Old World.

About eleven years ago I suddenly wondered if that scene--a father telling a young daughter tales about Dracula as they travel through Europe--might make a good structure for a novel. Once I started working with this idea, I decided to use the historical Dracula as well, and the book evolved into a historical novel with a lot of research along the way.