Ever since I read Dracula for the first time, the Brides have been characters that intrigued me. Stoker doesn’t provide any information about them, other than to describe their enchanting beauty and their deadly nature. I found myself asking questions about them. Where did they come from? How did they get where they were? What were their names?
The Brides is an attempt to come up with my own answers to those questions. However, while I used Dracula as my initial jumping-off point, my real inspiration was the rich and tumultuous history of the Balkans itself. No fiction writer could ever hope to match the stories and legends permeating this part of the world.
The Brides takes the reader on a journey from modern Berlin, capital of a reunified nation, to Berlin of the nineteenth century, capital of a newly unified empire; from contemporary Budapest to sixteenth-century Ottoman-controlled Buda; from war-shattered Sarajevo of the 1990s to war-torn Kosovo of the 1680s. Yasamin, Elena, and Elizabeth are all products of their times. They are all women struggling against the forces of history, trying to make lives for themselves without being swept away.
Unlike Stoker’s Dracula, the Dracula of The Brides is Vlad the Impaler, the fifteenth-century Prince of Wallachia known for his cruelty and his zealous fight against the Ottoman Turks. Other historical figures who make appearances include Michael the Brave, another prince of Wallachia, who succeeded in uniting all of the Romanian lands together for exactly one summer; Lady Emily Russell, the wife of the British ambassador to Germany during the 1878 Congress of Berlin; and Jovan Ristić, Serbian statesman, who was also present at the Congress of Berlin.
In researching this novel, I owe a great deal to the work of many others: Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Noel Malcolm’s Bosnia: A Short History and Kosovo: A Short History, Jason Goodwin’s Lords of the Horizons, Robert Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts, Caroline Finkel’s Osman’s Dream, and Misha Glenny’s The Balkans.