Given the premise, the book has the potential to be good, but sadly, Elizabeth Kostova sucks, so it was not to be. I read this back in the summer of 2005 while I traveling throughout Europe. I stayed with a woman in Stockholm for about a week, and The Historian was the only English language book that she owned. I had nothing else to read so I had a go. After reading the book, I wondered after wards if boredom was preferable to what I had just done. The novel was just flat. The characters were flat, the descriptions of the Eastern European cities were flat, the references to Ottoman history were flat, the love stories were flat. Flat flat flat. It's almost criminal how bad the book is, considering how much the author had to work with. I'm amazed how much money Elizabeth Kostova got for it. It just shows you how publishers view the general public as complete imbeciles.