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Science, secrets, murders, love and wounds that have left their deep marks in the souls of the characters – they all come together to make The Parchment Maze a novel about the past, the present and the future.

The author skillfully combines fictional characters and actual archaeological discoveries, thus making the readers aware of some not-so-famous real discoveries and artifacts, most of which made in the territory of today’s Bulgaria.

Ludmila Filipova is a young author with a few already published novels: Glass Butterflies, The Anatomy of Illusions and Scarlet Gold. But what  is important is that Ludmila is not afraid to experiment, always searching for something new; she does not strictly follow literary models and is meticulously avoidant of clichés; it’s difficult to frame her work in literary terms.

The Parchment Maze is a wonderful experiment. The idea behind it is simple and very effective. The reader is involved in an investigation, a quest for knowledge about an ancient civilization that has disappeared. Very few traces are left behind – most of the traces have been painstakingly obliterated. The reader becomes an archaeologist, a criminologist, and a discoverer. She is given access to a database of information consisting of documents, photos, artifacts, hints implying some directions that should lead him/her to the truth. And the truth is somewhere around us. We just need to see it.

The huge amount of documentary material found and collected speaks to the author’s credit. And so does the serious, thorough analysis of the facts. It is on those that the main hypothesis of the novel is based. The author has treated them really professionally including a lot of quotations, papers, photos and pictures on the pages of her novel.

In terms of genre, the book is situated somewhere between the classical historical novel, the game book and the fantasy type of literature.

The heroine is not a Lara Croft type. She is a thinking person, young and ambitious, bothered by one main question – is her theory about the civilization of the traceless an illusion or reality. In fact, it is the same question that captivates the reader’s mind and makes the reading of the book quick and pleasurable.

The clear, succinct style underlines the complexity of the main idea of the novel.

The Parchment Maze is actually the only Bulgarian example of a riddle novel. The worth of these novels stems from the fact that they easily engage readers of all ages and greatly facilitate their remembering of the information shared. On top of that, in this particular example, the action is fast, while the novel is full of suspense and is, therefore, likely to keep the readers absorbed.

The very structure of the book betrays experimentalism. It mirrors the structure of the ancient manuscript around which the intrigue in the story revolves. The book is supplied with superb illustrations and a lot of photographic material. All that leaves us with a definite feeling of the documentariness.

Overall, The Parchment Maze is an experiment that should be continued…

From the ever-engagingly changing ‘pictures’ you will learn why we, the people inhabiting the territories of the earliest civilization in the world, are responsible to unravel its mysteries and bring into the future its ancient knowledge about the meaning of the human life and the immortality of the human soul.