In the shadows

Elizabeth Kostova first visited Bulgaria as a young American woman soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall. She fell in love with this beautiful country and, in time, with a Bulgarian man. Then in 2017 she mixed a little bit of her own history with a lot of Bulgarian history to create a knock-out book, The Shadow Land.

The novel finds a young American woman, Alexandra Boyd, landing in Bulgaria to teach English, but before she can even leave the airport she finds herself caught up in intrigue, danger and a hint of romance.

She encounters an old man in a wheelchair, an old woman and a tall handsome younger man trying to get into a cab. She stops to helps, but after they drive away she discovers she is still holding an urn containing somebody's ashes.And so, after just a few minutes in the country, her adventure begins.

Her own cab driver, Bobby, a gay poet and political activist, volunteers to help Alexandra return the ashes to the three unknown people. Against his advice, she reports finding the ashes to the police. After that their every move is monitored.

Kostova takes us step by step through Alexandra and Bobby's search, while at the same telling the story of the man whose ashes fill that urn. He was perhaps Bulgaria's finest violinist, at least until he was sent to a work camp by the communist government then in power. He left an account of his years of hard labor, and somehow this hidden history threatens some powerful person in modern Bulgaria.

Kostova tells her story an even pace, gradually accelerating toward the exciting resolution.