A Tale of Two Love Stories
If you liked Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian , you might be into Possession , due to both novels' epistolary and historical natures. I say "might" because The Historian is a lot easier and more accessible to the average reader. The Historian is unputdownable, while Possession is a slower burn. Where The Historian is easily accessible, Possession, with the exception of its happy ending, is much more cerebral, with frequent oblique references to academic theories that a scholar in history or literature would find familiar, but most of us will end up needing to gloss over. Those parts are actually not 100% necessary to follow the story and start to thin out later, so if you can force your way through the first quarter, you'll do fine. The only thing that stops me from considering Possession to be a really great book is the ending, which was obvious and a little too... happy , in a fairy-tale type way. I'll leave it at that so as not to give anything away....