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A Discovery of Witches (All Souls Series) Paperback – December 27, 2011
| Deborah Harkness (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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All three seasons of the hit TV series “A Discovery of Witches” are streaming now on AMC+, Sundance Now and Shudder.
Deborah Harkness’s sparkling debut, A Discovery of Witches, has brought her into the spotlight and galvanized fans around the world. In this tale of passion and obsession, Diana Bishop, a young scholar and a descendant of witches, discovers a long-lost and enchanted alchemical manuscript, Ashmole 782, deep in Oxford's Bodleian Library. Its reappearance summons a fantastical underworld, which she navigates with her leading man, vampire geneticist Matthew Clairmont.
Harkness has created a universe to rival those of Anne Rice, Diana Gabaldon, and Elizabeth Kostova, and she adds a scholar's depth to this riveting tale of magic and suspense. The story continues in book two, Shadow of Night, and concludes with The Book of Life.
- Print length579 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPenguin Books
- Publication dateDecember 27, 2011
- Dimensions5.48 x 1.16 x 8.43 inches
- ISBN-109780143119685
- ISBN-13978-0143119685
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Editorial Reviews
Review
—People
“Romantic, erudite, and suspenseful . . . Harkness attends to every scholarly and emotional detail with whimsy, sensuality, and humor.”
—O, The Oprah Magazine
“A thoroughly grown-up novel packed with gorgeous historical detail and a gutsy, brainy heroine to match. . . . Harkness writes with thrilling gusto about the magical world.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Harkness conjures up a scintillating paranormal story. . . . Discover why everyone’s talking about this magical book.”
—USA Today
“Delightfully well-crafted and enchantingly imaginative . . . It has some of the same ineluctable atmosphere that made Anne Rice’s vampire books such a popular success.”
—Miami Herald
“A debut novel with a big supernatural canvas . . . Its ambitions are world-sized, ranging across history and zeroing in on DNA, human and otherwordly. Age-old tensions between science and magic and between evolution and alchemy erupt as Diana seeks to unlock the secrets of Ashmole 782.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Harkness, an eloquent writer, conjures this world of witches with Ivy League degrees and supernatural creatures completely—and believably—while maintaining a sense of wonder. . . . A Discovery of Witches is that rare historical novel that manages to be as intelligent as it is romantic. And it is supernatural fiction that those of us who usually prefer to stay grounded in reality can get caught up in. Pardon the pun, but Witches is truly spellbinding.”
—San Antonio News-Express
“Readers who thrilled to Elizabeth Kostova’s 2005 blockbuster, The Historian, will note the parallels, but A Discovery of Witches is a modern Romeo and Juliet story, with older, wiser lovers. Blood will flow when a witch and a vampire fall for each other. Author Deborah Harkness, a UCLA history professor, brings vast knowledge and research to the page.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Harkness works her own form of literary alchemy by deftly blending fantasy, romance, history, and horror into one completely bewitching book.”
—Chicago Tribune
“A Discovery of Witches becomes increasingly charming as it goes along. . . . A shrewdly written romp and a satisfying snow-day read for those of us who heartily enjoyed the likes of Anne Rice and Marion Zimmer Bradley. By the book’s rousing end . . . I was impatient for the sequel.”
—NPR
About the Author
Visit www.deborahharkness.com and follow “Deborah Harkness” on Facebook and @DebHarkness on Twitter.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
The leather-bound volume was nothing remarkable. To an ordinary historian, it would have looked no different from hundreds of other manuscripts in Oxford’s Bodleian Library, ancient and worn. But I knew there was something odd about it from the moment I collected it.
Duke Humfrey’s Reading Room was deserted on this late-September afternoon, and requests for library materials were filled quickly now that the summer crush of visiting scholars was over and the madness of the fall term had not yet begun. Even so, I was surprised when Sean stopped me at the call desk.
“Dr. Bishop, your manuscripts are up,” he whispered, voice tinged with a touch of mischief. The front of his argyle sweater was streaked with the rusty traces of old leather bindings, and he brushed at it self-consciously. A lock of sandy hair tumbled over his forehead when he did.
“Thanks,” I said, flashing him a grateful smile. I was flagrantly disregarding the rules limiting the number of books a scholar could call in a single day. Sean, who’d shared many a drink with me in the pink-stuccoed pub across the street in our graduate-student days, had been filling my requests without complaint for more than a week. “And stop calling me Dr. Bishop. I always think you’re talking to someone else.”
He grinned back and slid the manuscripts—all containing fine examples of alchemical illustrations from the Bodleian’s collections—over his battered oak desk, each one tucked into a protective gray cardboard box. “Oh, there’s one more.” Sean disappeared into the cage for a moment and returned with a thick, quarto-size manuscript bound simply in mottled calfskin. He laid it on top of the pile and stooped to inspect it. The thin gold rims of his glasses sparked in the dim light provided by the old bronze reading lamp that was attached to a shelf. “This one’s not been called up for a while. I’ll make a note that it needs to be boxed after you return it.”
“Do you want me to remind you?”
“No. Already made a note here.” Sean tapped his head with his fingertips.
“Your mind must be better organized than mine.” My smile widened.
Sean looked at me shyly and tugged on the call slip, but it remained where it was, lodged between the cover and the first pages. “This one doesn’t want to let go,” he commented.
Muffled voices chattered in my ear, intruding on the familiar hush of the room.
“Did you hear that?” I looked around, puzzled by the strange sounds.
“What?” Sean replied, looking up from the manuscript.
Traces of gilt shone along its edges and caught my eye. But those faded touches of gold could not account for a faint, iridescent shimmer that seemed to be escaping from between the pages. I blinked.
“Nothing.” I hastily drew the manuscript toward me, my skin prickling when it made contact with the leather. Sean’s fingers were still holding the call slip, and now it slid easily out of the binding’s grasp. I hoisted the volumes into my arms and tucked them under my chin, assailed by a whiff of the uncanny that drove away the library’s familiar smell of pencil shavings and floor wax.
“Diana? Are you okay?” Sean asked with a concerned frown.
“Fine. Just a bit tired,” I replied, lowering the books away from my nose.
I walked quickly through the original, fifteenth-century part of the library, past the rows of Elizabethan reading desks with their three ascending bookshelves and scarred writing surfaces. Between them, Gothic windows directed the reader’s attention up to the coffered ceilings, where bright paint and gilding picked out the details of the university’s crest of three crowns and open book and where its motto, “God is my illumination,” was proclaimed repeatedly from on high.
Another American academic, Gillian Chamberlain, was my sole companion in the library on this Friday night. A classicist who taught at Bryn Mawr, Gillian spent her time poring over scraps of papyrus sandwiched between sheets of glass. I sped past her, trying to avoid eye contact, but the creaking of the old floor gave me away.
My skin tingled as it always did when another witch looked at me.
“Diana?” she called from the gloom. I smothered a sigh and stopped.
“Hi, Gillian.” Unaccountably possessive of my hoard of manuscripts, I remained as far from the witch as possible and angled my body so they weren’t in her line of sight.
“What are you doing for Mabon?” Gillian was always stopping by my desk to ask me to spend time with my “sisters” while I was in town. With the Wiccan celebrations of the autumn equinox just days away, she was redoubling her efforts to bring me into the Oxford coven.
“Working,” I said promptly.
“There are some very nice witches here, you know,” Gillian said with prim disapproval. “You really should join us on Monday.”
“Thanks. I’ll think about it,” I said, already moving in the direction of the Selden End, the airy seventeenth-century addition that ran perpendicular to the main axis of Duke Humfrey’s. “I’m working on a conference paper, though, so don’t count on it.” My aunt Sarah had always warned me it wasn’t possible for one witch to lie to another, but that hadn’t stopped me from trying.
Gillian made a sympathetic noise, but her eyes followed me.
Back at my familiar seat facing the arched, leaded windows, I resisted the temptation to dump the manuscripts on the table and wipe my hands. Instead, mindful of their age, I lowered the stack carefully.
The manuscript that had appeared to tug on its call slip lay on top of the pile. Stamped in gilt on the spine was a coat of arms belonging to Elias Ashmole, a seventeenth-century book collector and alchemist whose books and papers had come to the Bodleian from the Ashmolean Museum in the nineteenth century, along with the number 782. I reached out, touching the brown leather.
A mild shock made me withdraw my fingers quickly, but not quickly enough. The tingling traveled up my arms, lifting my skin into tiny goose pimples, then spread across my shoulders, tensing the muscles in my back and neck. These sensations quickly receded, but they left behind a hollow feeling of unmet desire. Shaken by my response, I stepped away from the library table.
Even at a safe distance, this manuscript was challenging me—threatening the walls I’d erected to separate my career as a scholar from my birthright as the last of the Bishop witches. Here, with my hard-earned doctorate, tenure, and promotions in hand and my career beginning to blossom, I’d renounced my family’s heritage and created a life that depended on reason and scholarly abilities, not inexplicable hunches and spells. I was in Oxford to complete a research project. Upon its conclusion, my findings would be published, substantiated with extensive analysis and footnotes, and presented to human colleagues, leaving no room for mysteries and no place in my work for what could be known only through a witch’s sixth sense.
But—albeit unwittingly—I had called up an alchemical manuscript that I needed for my research and that also seemed to possess an otherworldly power that was impossible to ignore. My fingers itched to open it and learn more. Yet an even stronger impulse held me back: Was my curiosity intellectual, related to my scholarship? Or did it have to do with my family’s connection to witchcraft?
I drew the library’s familiar air into my lungs and shut my eyes, hoping that would bring clarity. The Bodleian had always been a sanctuary to me, a place unassociated with the Bishops. Tucking my shaking hands under my elbows, I stared at Ashmole 782 in the growing twilight and wondered what to do.
My mother would instinctively have known the answer, had she been standing in my place. Most members of the Bishop family were talented witches, but my mother, Rebecca, was special. Everyone said so. Her supernatural abilities had manifested early, and by the time she was in grade school, she could outmagic most of the senior witches in the local coven with her intuitive understanding of spells, startling foresight, and uncanny knack for seeing beneath the surface of people and events. My mother’s younger sister, my Aunt Sarah, was a skilled witch, too, but her talents were more mainstream: a deft hand with potions and a perfect command of witchcraft’s traditional lore of spells and charms.
My fellow historians didn’t know about the family, of course, but everyone in Madison, the remote town in upstate New York where I’d lived with Sarah since the age of seven, knew all about the Bishops. My ancestors had moved from Massachusetts after the Revolutionary War. By then more than a century had passed since Bridget Bishop was executed at Salem. Even so, rumors and gossip followed them to their new home. After pulling up stakes and resettling in Madison, the Bishops worked hard to demonstrate how useful it could be to have witchy neighbors for healing the sick and predicting the weather. In time the family set down roots in the community deep enough to withstand the inevitable outbreaks of superstition and human fear.
But my mother had a curiosity about the world that led her beyond the safety of Madison. She went first to Harvard, where she met a young wizard named Stephen Proctor. He also had a long magical lineage and a desire to experience life outside the scope of his family’s New England history and influence. Rebecca Bishop and Stephen Proctor were a charming couple, my mother’s all-American frankness a counterpoint to my father’s more formal, old-fashioned ways. They became anthropologists, immersing themselves in foreign cultures and beliefs, sharing their intellectual passions along with their deep devotion to each other. After securing positions on the faculty in area schools—my mother at her alma mater, my father at Wellesley—they made research trips abroad and made a home for their new family in Cambridge.
I have few memories of my childhood, but each one is vivid and surprisingly clear. All feature my parents: the feel of corduroy on my father’s elbows, the lily of the valley that scented my mother’s perfume, the clink of their wineglasses on Friday nights when they’d put me to bed and dine together by candlelight. My mother told me bedtime stories, and my father’s brown briefcase clattered when he dropped it by the front door. These memories would strike a familiar chord with most people.
Other recollections of my parents would not. My mother never seemed to do laundry, but my clothes were always clean and neatly folded. Forgotten permission slips for field trips to the zoo appeared in my desk when the teacher came to collect them. And no matter what condition my father’s study was in when I went in for a good-night kiss (and it usually looked as if something had exploded), it was always perfectly orderly the next morning. In kindergarten I’d asked my friend Amanda’s mother why she bothered washing the dishes with soap and water when all you needed to do was stack them in the sink, snap your fingers, and whisper a few words. Mrs. Schmidt laughed at my strange idea of housework, but confusion had clouded her eyes.
That night my parents told me we had to be careful about how we spoke about magic and with whom we discussed it. Humans outnumbered us and found our power frightening, my mother explained, and fear was the strongest force on earth. I hadn’t confessed at the time that magic—my mother’s especially—frightened me, too.
By day my mother looked like every other kid’s mother in Cambridge: slightly unkempt, a bit disorganized, and perpetually harassed by the pressures of home and office. Her blond hair was fashionably tousled even though the clothes she wore remained stuck in 1977—long billowy skirts, oversize pants and shirts, and men’s vests and blazers she picked up in thrift stores the length and breadth of Boston in imitation of Annie Hall. Nothing would have made you look twice if you passed her in the street or stood behind her in the supermarket.
In the privacy of our home, with the curtains drawn and the door locked, my mother became someone else. Her movements were confident and sure, not rushed and hectic. Sometimes she even seemed to float. As she went around the house, singing and picking up stuffed animals and books, her face slowly transformed into something otherworldly and beautiful. When my mother was lit up with magic, you couldn’t tear your eyes away from her.
“Mommy’s got a firecracker inside her,” was the way my father explained it with his wide, indulgent grin. But firecrackers, I learned, were not simply bright and lively. They were unpredictable, and they could startle and frighten you, too.
My father was at a lecture one night when my mother decided to clean the silver and became mesmerized by a bowl of water she’d set on the dining-room table. As she stared at the glassy surface, it became covered with a fog that twisted itself into tiny, ghostly shapes. I gasped with delight as they grew, filling the room with fantastic beings. Soon they were crawling up the drapes and clinging to the ceiling. I cried out for my mother’s help, but she remained intent on the water. Her concentration didn’t waver until something half human and half animal crept near and pinched my arm. That brought her out of her reveries, and she exploded into a shower of angry red light that beat back the wraiths and left an odor of singed feathers in the house. My father noticed the strange smell the moment he returned, his alarm evident. He found us huddled in bed together. At the sight of him, my mother burst into apologetic tears. I never felt entirely safe in the dining room again.
Any remaining sense of security evaporated after I turned seven, when my mother and father went to Africa and didn’t come back alive.
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Product details
- ASIN : 0143119680
- Publisher : Penguin Books; 1st edition (December 27, 2011)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 579 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780143119685
- ISBN-13 : 978-0143119685
- Item Weight : 1.14 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.48 x 1.16 x 8.43 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #25,839 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #101 in Vampire Thrillers
- #173 in Witch & Wizard Thrillers
- #298 in Occult Fiction
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Deborah Harkness is a #1 New York Times bestselling author who draws on her expertise as an historian of science, medicine, and the history of the book to create rich narratives steeped in magical realism, historical curiosity, and deeply human questions about what it is that makes us who we are. The first book in Harkness’s beloved All Souls series, A Discovery of Witches, was an instant New York Times bestseller and the series has since expanded with the addition of subsequent NYT bestsellers, Shadow of Night (2012), The Book of Life (2014), and Time’s Convert (2018), as well as the companion reader, The World of All Souls. The All Souls series has been translated in thirty-eight languages. The popular television adaptation of A Discovery of Witches, starring Teresa Palmer and Matthew Goode, was released in 2019 by Sky/Sundance Now, and also broadcast on AMC.
Having spent more than a quarter of a century as a student and scholar of history, Harkness holds degrees from Mount Holyoke College, Northwestern University, and the University of California at Davis. She is currently a professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she teaches European history and the history of science. Harkness has published scholarly articles on topics such as the influence of theatrical conventions on the occult sciences, scientific households, female medical practice in early modern London, medical curiosity, and the influence of accounting practices on scientific record keeping. She has received Fulbright, Guggenheim, and National Humanities Center fellowships, and her most recent scholarly work is The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonReviewed in the United States on June 14, 2019
Top reviews from the United States
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The reason I knocked off a star is because I wish I had more of the actual plot instead of just constantly focusing on the romance. The other concepts are so interesting I wish the author would explore those more. I understand their romance is at the center of it all, but jeez we get it they love each other can we discuss any of the other million things going on for just a moment? Maybe that's just personal preference, though.
Also, it feels like Diana is constantly a damsel in distress and it is frustrating that even when she finally starts using her powers, she still needs a man to save her. And when her aunts are trying to help, the only person who actually helps her at all is a vampire and a man that she only just met, and it seems like a slap in the face to her aunts. I realize Diana has overwhelming power that is difficult for her aunts to teach, but Matthew isn't even a witch and he can help her.
I was torn between 3 and 4 stars because I really did enjoy the book. The alchemy and the feuding of all the creatures is interesting, I want to know what happens, but Diana is so subservient and always needs a man to rescue her it is just annoying, and Matthew is just an ass.
I really want to know what happens because the story and the writing are both great, but their relationship just dominates everything and it gets monotonous and they both annoy me, so for that reason I do not think I will read the next book. HOWEVER, if your preference is extra sappy love stories with plot on the side, this is for you. I don't say that as an insult because that is the type of book a lot of people like and maybe that's what this is supposed to be, but I was just looking for something else.
(Though reviews are inherently subjective, I prefer to provide some organization to my opinions through the use of a personal rubric. The following notes may contain spoilers.)
Plot and Setting: 4.6 -- Plot is engaging from start to finish. Has many unique elements, no major holes, and a sense of focus. Major plot points are dropped or not resolved (cliffhanger). Setting is clear and believable. Timeline is clear and consistent. This is an incredibly detailed world, with interesting creatures, complex politics, and complicated family dynamics, all mixed in with elements of the mundane, ordinary world. There's terror and romance, adventure and personal revelations. It's complicated, and it doesn't resolve, leading directly into the next book, but it is wonderful. And it is clearly a well-planned story, since it is possible to track the days as they pass, from September 18 to October 31.
Characters: 5 -- Relatable, realistic, interesting, dynamic characters. Even minor characters have depth, as do the relationships between characters. We meet many, many characters, with their own stories, personalities, creature attributes, and motivations (both benevolent and evil). They are all incredibly well imagined and outlined. Diana's struggle to accept her magic ability, and all that comes with it, makes her very relatable, and I enjoyed her relationships with Matthew, Sarah and Emily, Ysabeau and Marthe, and all her other friends and acquaintances.
Mechanics and Writing: 5 -- Few, if any, typos, punctuation issues, or word errors. (<3/100pgs) Intelligent use of POV. Skillful writing that adds to the story. Errors include: compound word and/or homophone confusion, mild punctuation or formatting issues. POV is mainly 1st-person Diana, with some scenes (all or almost all when Diana is not present to narrate) in a sort of universal 3rd-person narrative, dipping into the thoughts of whoever is needed to tell the important details.
Redeeming Value: 3.6 -- Partially focused uplifting themes or lessons. Drugs, alcohol, violence, etc, are not glorified, though there is some shaky ground. A few borderline explicit sex scenes. Implied moral guidelines for behavior. No actual sex, though there's lots of kissing and intimate acts of 'bundling' between Diana and Matthew, and other sexual relationships are mentioned. A good deal of violence, which grows bloody and/or deadly more than once. Wine is a big deal, but it's enjoyed responsibly. Vampire politics and morality are apparently different from the human versions, falling more into the medieval, or even bestial. Some witches head that way, too. Lots of power plays, long grudges, etc.
Personal Enjoyment: 5 -- I loved it. It made me feel in all the best ways, and leaves me content and satisfied. One I'll definitely read again.
BLECH! Get me a bucket. This is no Harry Potter for grown-ups. NY Times, you lied!
Top reviews from other countries
Some great imaginative touches in the book, particularly the magical house, but much of it was rather too 'Twilight' for me, and the obsessive love and devotion thing overdone.
If I got the following books for free I might read them to see if Diana develops into a more likeable character, but otherwise I wouldn't read them. Sorry.
Diana Bishop, an American academic studying in Oxford, is well aware that she is a witch but has always refused to accept her powers. The reasons for this are gradually revealed throughout the story and, as a result, the reader is more sympathetic to the character. The world Diana inhabits includes witches as well as vampires and daemons (creative types who are mercurial and unpredictable but not inherently evil) and all three groups are after a manuscript which it appears can only be accessed by Diana.
She is befriended and later falls in love with a vampire - this is a serious no no in Diana's world and their love affair is the catalyst for troubles far beyond the characters of the story. The novel moves from Oxford to France and then on to upstate New York before ending on a significant cliffhanger that leads into Book 2.
On the whole I found the story engaging, accessible and well written. It made a pleasant change from my more usual choice of story. Mostly it is told in the first person by Diana with occasional chapters being told in the third person. This does break the flow of the story somewhat and it is a shame that the author could not have found a way of conveying the information we needed whilst still in Diana's voice. Jim Butcher (author of the Dresden Files) is a master of this and perhaps could have proved a source of reference for the writer.
My only real criticisms of the story is that the love story between Diana and Matthew is overdone in places to the point of being almost nauseatingly saccharine. I can only assume that this was to attract the Twilight and Fifty Shades fans to the book but I hope that it is toned down in the other books of the trilogy.
Secondly an essential power that forms the major plot element at the end of the story (and, given how the book ends, presumably for the whole of book 2) is only introduced very late on. It would have been nice to have it foreshadowed at least earlier in the book. I wonder if the author had decided how to the end the story late on and was not willing to go back and stitch in some references or hints early on (or maybe I just missed them!)
Overall though it was an enjoyable read. I look forward to the Sky adaptation and will turn my attention to book 2 in the fullness of time.
Many reviews stated that Diana became wet. I do not necessarily agree. She was a strong and confident character at the onset because she had worked hard and achieved success as an academic. This was her life's work and she was good at it. Her supernatural powers, on the other hand, were ill developed and repressed and bounded so she did not have confidence in them. So to be thrust in a maelstrom of events where everyone wanted a piece your power which you are ignorant of or can't access, was frightening.; and rightly so as she could have died on a number of occasions.
Enter the protector. I loved him as he was described as a perfect alfa. But it all ended in the description. We did not see him do much outside of his commanding presence. He also failed the most basic of basic test of any hero and that is to protect the heroine or die trying. Actually he nearly killed her trying to survive. Therefore l will wait for the movies as they promise to be great.












