The Swan Thieves: A Novel (Hardcover)
Editorial Reviews From Publishers Weekly [Signature] Reviewed by Katharine WeberElizabeth Kostova made a dramatic debut in 2005 with her megabestselling The Historian . The first debut novel to hit the New York Times bestseller list at #1, The Historian has been published in 44 languages, has more than 1.5 million copies in print, and there's a Sony film in the works. A hefty, quirky, historical vampire thriller that took 10 years to write and for which a reported $2 million advance was paid, The Historian has managed through sheer bulk and majestic grandeur to confer upon itself the literary weight of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose , even as it offers up some of the easy delights and generic writing skimps that put it on the Da Vinci Code shelf. The Swan Thieves revisits certain themes and strategies of The Historian , chief among them an academic hero who is drawn into a quest for knowledge about the central mystery, only to develop an obsession that becomes the driv