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Elizabeth Kostova will visit City Lights on Thursday, November 12th at 6:00pm to share her new novel, Mystery Play, in conversation with Ron Rash.The last living member of a family of historians who has been hunted by dark forces associated with Dracula finds himself in peril at the hands of a new threat in this thrilling novel from the #1 bestselling author of The Historian.
After his beloved mother passes away suddenly, Jay Turner finds himself at a crossroads. She was always secretive, and when he returns to their Boston home to clear out her possessions, he finds an unusual item: a partially burned scrap of newspaper bearing the name “Gael Brogan.” Soon after, a deliveryman leaves behind a package containing a small antique volume bound in leather—and two bloody footprints.
The sight of the volume is chilling. As a young scholar, his mother had been given the medieval book—one of a set commissioned by Vlad Țepeș, otherwise known as Dracula, just before his death in 1477. She’d always warned Jay of the dangers associated with it, and had donated it to a museum before she died . . . yet here it is, back in his possession.
Jay sets out to learn more about Gael Brogan, a prominent nineteenth-century actor whose last and most famous role was based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. As Jay begins to dig deeper—with the help of a mysterious woman named Rhiannon—he uncovers the frightening story of a young actress who fell under Brogan’s sway long ago. Before long, Jay and Rhiannon realize that something similarly implacable is pursuing them.
In this epic and riveting tale, Elizabeth Kostova takes us deep into the Gilded Age of the theater and across the Atlantic in pursuit of an ancient evil and its dramatic followers.
Elizabeth Kostova is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Shadow Land, The Swan Thieves, and The Historian. She graduated from Yale and holds an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she won a Hopwood Award for Novel-in-Progress. She is also co-founder of the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation for Creative Writing in Bulgaria.
Ron Rash is the author of the 2009 PEN/Faulkner finalist and New York Times bestseller Serena and Above the Waterfall, in addition to five prizewinning novels, including The Caretaker, The Cove, One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, and The World Made Straight; four collections of poems; and six collections of stories, among them Burning Bright, which won the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and Chemistry and Other Stories, which was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award. Twice the recipient of the O. Henry Prize, he teaches at Western Carolina University.
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