Dernière sortie
XENIA
Eastern Serbia, 1890. Some doors should never be knocked on twice. When young solicitor's clerk Konrad Vogel is sent from Vienna to a remote tower-house above the wine hills of Rajac, he expects nothing stranger than a stubborn client's signature. He finds Xenia instead - a noblewoman untouched by time, whose native soil hides more than three centuries of secrets beneath the old wine cellars, and whose hunger has waited far longer than any man should ever make her wait.
Back in Vienna, Konrad's fiancée Klara begins to suspect his letters are hiding more than distance ever could. Her dearest friend Amalie grows pale and restless with dreams of a dark garden. And in a private asylum outside the city, a patient obsessed with flies, sparrows, and a woman he calls only "the lady" may be the only one who understands what is coming down the Danube - thirteen sealed cases of grave-earth, and the creature who cannot survive without them.
As Vienna's polished drawing rooms give way to candlelit vigils and consecrated iron, a small circle of friends - a heartbroken fiancé, an American adventurer, a folklorist who has spent his life studying what others refuse to believe, and a woman no longer willing to be protected from the truth - must decide how far love will carry them against something ancient, seductive, and, worst of all, almost sincere.
Rooted in the real 18th-century Habsburg vampire inquiries of Eastern Serbia - the same soil that gave the world the word "vampire" long before Transylvania ever claimed it - XENIA is a gothic novel of blood, loneliness, and the terrible cost of being loved by something that has forgotten how to stop. Wine keeps secrets. Some secrets should never be awakened.
Back in Vienna, Konrad's fiancée Klara begins to suspect his letters are hiding more than distance ever could. Her dearest friend Amalie grows pale and restless with dreams of a dark garden. And in a private asylum outside the city, a patient obsessed with flies, sparrows, and a woman he calls only "the lady" may be the only one who understands what is coming down the Danube - thirteen sealed cases of grave-earth, and the creature who cannot survive without them.
As Vienna's polished drawing rooms give way to candlelit vigils and consecrated iron, a small circle of friends - a heartbroken fiancé, an American adventurer, a folklorist who has spent his life studying what others refuse to believe, and a woman no longer willing to be protected from the truth - must decide how far love will carry them against something ancient, seductive, and, worst of all, almost sincere.
Rooted in the real 18th-century Habsburg vampire inquiries of Eastern Serbia - the same soil that gave the world the word "vampire" long before Transylvania ever claimed it - XENIA is a gothic novel of blood, loneliness, and the terrible cost of being loved by something that has forgotten how to stop. Wine keeps secrets. Some secrets should never be awakened.
