Book description
It began with A DISCOVERY OF WITCHES. Historian Diana Bishop, descended
from a line of powerful witches, and long-lived vampire Matthew
Clairmont have broken the laws dividing creatures. When Diana discovered
a significant alchemical manuscript in the Bodleian Library, she sparked
a struggle in which she became bound to Matthew. Now the fragile
coexistence of witches, daemons, vampires and humans is dangerously
threatened. Seeking safety, Diana and Matthew travel back in time to
London, 1590. But they soon realise that the past may not provide a
haven. Reclaiming his former identity as poet and spy for Queen
Elizabeth, the vampire falls back in with a group of radicals known as
the School of Night. Many are unruly daemons, the creative minds of the
age, including playwright Christopher Marlowe and mathematician Thomas
Harriot. Together Matthew and Diana scour Tudor London for the elusive
manuscript Ashmole 782, and search for the witch who will teach Diana
how to control her remarkable powers... Fall under the spell of Diana
and Matthew once more in this stunning, richly imagined, epic tale.
Deborah Harkness is a professor of history at USC, specialising in
science and medicine in early modern Europe. She is the author most
recently of THE JEWEL HOUSE (Yale, 2007), based on her ground-breaking
work on how science was practiced in Elizabethan London. (And she really
did once find a missing manuscript in the Bodleian Library!)
