The Historian | Literary Criticism & Book Review

The Historian Critical Overview

Elizabeth Kostova did not expect the exuberant welcome she received from the publishing world when she started shopping The Historian, as she told Gary Younge in an interview for the Guardian (U.K.):

I knew it could be a long and sometimes helpless wait. I thought maybe in six months someone would write back and say, "Sorry, but this is such a strange book we don't know how we would market it but good luck in sending it somewhere else."

To her astonishment, the book sparked a bidding war that brought the author an advance of $2 million. The book then sold foreign publishing rights in twenty-eight languages before Sony bought the film rights for another $2 million. The book went straight to the top of the New York Times Bestsellers list, selling "more copies than The Da Vinci Code on its first day," according to Younge.