Anne Rice, creator of the Vampire Lestat, the Mayfair witches and the
amazing worlds they inhabit, now gives us the first in a new series of
novels linked together by the fledgling vampire David Talbot, who has
set out to become a chronicler of his fellow Undead.
The novel
opens in present-day Paris in a crowded café, where David meets
Pandora. She is two thousand years old, a Child of the Millennia, the
first vampire ever made by the great Marius. David persuades her to
tell the story of her life.
Pandora begins, reluctantly at
first and then with increasing passion, to recount her mesmerizing
tale, which takes us through the ages, from Imperial Rome to
eighteenth-century France to twentieth-century Paris and New Orleans.
She carries us back to her mortal girlhood in the world of Caesar
Augustus, a world chronicled by Ovid and Petronius. This is where
Pandora meets and falls in love with the handsome, charismatic,
lighthearted, still-mortal Marius. This is the Rome she is forced to
flee in fear of assassination by conspirators plotting to take over the
city. And we follow her to the exotic port of Antioch, where she is
destined to be reunited with Marius, now immortal and haunted by his
vampire nature, who will bestow on her the Dark Gift as they set out on
the fraught and fantastic adventure of their two turbulent centuries
together.
