Why would North Carolinian Elizabeth Kostova, who is a New York Times No.1 bestselling author, set her action-packed novel in Bulgaria?

I will give you an answer in a minute. But first, a little bit about her new book, The Shadow Land.

The book’s main character is a young North Carolina mountain woman, Alexandra Boyd. On her first day in the country she meets a small Bulgarian family group. They tell her they are on the way to a beautiful monastery and suggest she consider visiting it later. After they part ways, Alexandra finds she has a satchel that belongs to the Bulgarian group.

A young taxi driver called Bobby befriends her as she seeks to find the satchel’s owners. In the satchel is a wooden urn, containing
ashes and inscribed with the name Stoyan Lazarov.

She and Bobby report the incident to the local police. The police give them an address for Lazarov.

First, Alexandra and Bobby rush to the monastery and search for the Bulgarian group, but find no one. As they prepare to leave, they realize they have been locked in a room. Alexandra thinks “nothing in her previous experience had prepared her for the feeling of being suddenly locked in a monastic room with a stranger five thousand miles from the Blue Ridge Mountains, holding an urn containing the ashes of another stranger. In addition to being tired and afraid, she was suddenly a thief, a vagrant and a prisoner.”

Although they escape from the monastery, they cannot escape a growing awareness that they are being followed and possessing this urn has put them in danger.

Nevertheless, the next day they go to the address provided by the police. The house is empty of people, but photos and papers there confirm the urn’s owners had lived there. A neighbor gives them another address elsewhere in Bulgaria.

Before leaving town, Alexandra and Bobby adopt a stray dog, which becomes an important character with a major role in one of the concluding scenes. Kostova introduces other people, including an older, wealthy businessman-turned-politician named Kurilkov and known as “The Bear.” He is seeking to win the next election on the promise of “non-corruption.”

There are growing and inexplicable dangers: vandalized cars, threats, murder and kidnapping. Only if the urn contains some valuable secret can there be an explanation for the unsettling situation.

An explanation of the urn’s secret and its dangerous value becomes the spine on which Kostova builds the book’s surprising and violent resolution.  

On that same spine she attaches another story, that of Stoyan Lazarov, a talented violinist, lover of Vivaldi, loving husband and father, who ran afoul of Bulgaria’s post-World War II brutal communist dictatorship. He was confined for many years in a torturous labor camp where work conditions and weather almost killed him and destroyed his health and his prospects for a fulfilling musical career.

 At the work camp, he met two men, one a friend and fellow inmate and the other a guard who becomes a heated enemy. Both characters play a major part in the book’s dramatic conclusion.

Why, then, did Kostova set this book in Bulgaria? Explaining her fascination for that nation, she writes about her first visit when she first came to “this mysterious country, hidden for so long behind the Iron Curtain,” and she felt, “I had somehow come home.”

Kostova’s novel takes her readers on a tour of Bulgaria: its mountains, its cities and villages, its forests and seashores. Her poetic descriptions of Bulgaria’s landscapes and people made this reader want to see for myself the country she loves so much.