The Swan Thieves »

Elizabeth Kostova graduated from Yale and holds an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she won  the Hopwood Award for the Novel-in-Progress.

Psychiatrist Andrew Marlowe has a perfectly ordered life solitary, perhaps, but full of devotion to his profession and the painting hobby he loves. This order is destroyed when renowned painter Robert Oliver attacks a canvas in the National Gallery of Art and becomes his patient. In response, Marlowe finds himself going beyond his own legal and ethical boundaries to understand the secret that torments this genius, a journey that will lead him into the lives of the women closest to Robert Oliver and toward a tragedy at the heart of French Impressionism. Ranging from American museums to the coast of Normandy, from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth, from young love to last love, THE SWAN THIEVES is a story of obsession, the losses of history, and the power of art to preserve human hope.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Elizabeth Kostova's 2005 debut, The Historian, is one of those bestsellers that confirm the unpredictability of the reading public's taste. Nothing about the novel operates according to established formula. It is a vampire story without gore or brooding passions, a historical thriller without much in the way of action. The facts in it (and despite the supernatural premise, there is a lot of history in The Historian) are rigorously researched and unsensationalized. Unlike most contemporary authors who claim to be inspired by the 19th-century novel, Kostova actually hews pretty close to the Victorian model; her narrative unfolds at a pace that can only be called sedate. There are no grabby openers or flashy twists. She has placed her faith in the conviction that readers are pleased to sink slowly into a novel, until the world it conjures has closed over their heads, submerging them entirely.