THE SHADOW LAND
When US author Elizabeth Kostova first visited Bulgaria in 1989, she fell in love with the country’s spectacular natural beauty, the friendliness of the people and the traditional music.
Kostova’s trip, as a young Yale University graduate, coincided with the collapse of Bulgaria’s communist dictatorship and the author developed an insatiable curiosity about the history of the country.
She has now written her third novel, The Shadow Land, about Bulgaria’s mysterious “closed history”.
Kostova, 52, has since visited Bulgaria many times, gaining friends as well as a husband – computer scientist Georgi Kostov, whom she married in 1990.
“The trip in 1989 was an amazing experience,” she says. “I was there seven days after the Berlin Wall fell (in communist East Germany) so I was there when the country was facing huge changes … I was able to use this material for my books.”
Kostova’s bestselling debut novel The Historian (2005), which sold three million copies, is partly set in Bulgaria and covers the story of a young woman who seeks to discover the grave of Dracula.
With The Shadow Land, she not only had the opportunity to write about the hospitality of the Bulgarian people and describe the country’s striking landscape, she was able to explore its dark past.
Kostova says when Bulgaria became a one-party socialist state, as part of the Soviet Union-led Eastern bloc in 1946, many communist practices were adopted, including the forced-labour camp system.
Tens of thousands of people were sent to these camps in Bulgaria, including Nazi collaborators, loyal communists, political dissidents, petty criminals and young people targeted for small cultural infringements.
In 2013, Kostova gained rare access to the infamous Belene labour camp, now in ruins and closed to the public. It was while standing in the camp’s desolate yard that she started to imagine the story for The Shadow Land.
“The place had a haunted feeling, it was worse than empty … it felt like a place drained of all humanity,” she says. “They [the labour camps] are the black hole in this country’s history. The visit really changed me … I could imagine the prisoners being marched in and out each day, barely alive and needing food and warmth.”
The Shadow Land tells the story of a young university graduate, Alexandra Boyd, who has recently arrived in Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, to teach English.
“I saw the opening dramatic scene for my novel in my dream,” Kostova says. “I saw Alexandra on the hotel steps, and accidentally taking [the wrong] bag and ending up with human remains.”
It is 1998 and Alexandra is holding the ashes of a man named Stoyan, a labour camp survivor. It is Stoyan’s family, including his son Neven, who is involved in the luggage mix-up with Alexandra at a taxi rank outside the hotel.
When Alexandra realises the bag she is holding does not belong to her, but instead contains an ornate and beautifully carved wooden box, she vows to return the ashes.
Thankfully, her taxi driver, also a poet and former police officer, is a man of many talents. Together they drive the length and breadth of Bulgaria trying to find Neven and his family, who seem to have disappeared.
The novel jumps between the entwined stories of their search for Stoyan’s family and the story of Stoyan, a talented violinist who studied at a music academy in Vienna before World War II. In 1949, Stoyan becomes the target of the communist secret police and is sent to a labour camp where he struggles to survive the conditions.
To research Stoyan’s story, Kostova listened to the oral history of about 20 camp survivors. “I was interested to explore how Stoyan could survive the kind of treatment and desolation that he received in the camp … and how he kept his humanity,” she says. “It was painful to write about it, to sit down day after day and read the oral material … which gave me a very detailed and a chilling sense of what people went through.”
Kostova, who was born in Connecticut and whose family is originally from Slovenia, was surprised by the success of The Historian, which was the first debut novel in US publishing history to make its entrance at No.1 on the New York Times Bestseller List. It has been translated into 40 languages. Her second novel, The Swan Thieves (2010), has been translated into 27 languages.
Kostova received $US2 million ($2.52 million) for the publishing rights for The Historian and has used some of the money to establish the Sofia-based Elizabeth Kostova Foundation to promote Bulgarian literature. The BBC this year optioned the TV rights for The Historian.
“I had such a grand time writing The Historian, which was a work of the imagination,” she says.
“It was satisfying for me to go back to some of that ground and write about real people’s lives … and serious history in The Shadow Land.
“It [the novel] helped me get to know Bulgaria in a new way: the great as well as the dark and beautiful.” Odds are you won’t be able to put this thriller down. It starts in Canberra, where the Government is making draconian decisions about border protection, and moves on to an Indonesian-built boat full of Australian tourists on a surfing safari out of Bali, and then to a similar boat full of Middle Eastern asylum seekers that is heading for Ashmore Reef. The two boats meet in tragic circumstances on a coral atoll. Jock Serong writes quite brilliantly of the sea and surfing, drawing pictures that stay in the mind long after the book has moved on to darker themes. The key characters in each scenario are fully and sympathetically drawn, particularly two nine-year-olds, both forced into an untimely maturity. Author and former journalist Louise Penny has charmed readers with her Inspector Gamache books. This title, the first in the series, won the CWA John Creasey Dagger Award. Set in a small town – Three Pines, near Montreal – a beloved elderly villager is found dead. Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and Inspector Beauvoir find themselves in the picturesque village, initially investigating an accidental death. It turns out to be murder, and dark secrets start unravelling. Insp Gamache believes crime is a deeply human condition of which we are all capable, and that anything can trigger it. The likeable and realistic characters bring small village dynamics to life. Get your discounted copy of Louise Penny’s Still Life using the coupon below