A Discovery of Witches

Fantasy

First published: 2011
Print length: 579 pagesViking, 2011

Description

Diana Bishop is a Yale historian who has rejected her inheritance as a witch since the deaths of her parents. While researching at Oxford’s Bodleian Library, she touches Ashmole 782, a long-missing manuscript whose enchantment activates her dormant powers and draws supernatural seekers into her scholarly life. Matthew Clairmont, a vampire with his own interest in the book, helps Diana investigate its secrets and begin understanding her abilities. Their growing attachment places them amid rivalries, prohibitions, and danger within a divided magical community. Combining romance with historical and alchemical inquiry, the novel uses the manuscript’s mystery to explore the origins of witches, vampires, and other creatures, as well as the uneasy possibility of coexistence among them and humans.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Atmospheric · Descriptive · Lyrical

Pace

Measured

Tone

Atmospheric · Cerebral · Romantic · Suspenseful

Structure

Linear

Focus

Mystery · Relationships · World

Emotional intensity

4 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 3 / 5
Ideas: 3 / 5
Structure: 3 / 5
Background knowledge: 2 / 5

Themes

BelongingCommunityIdentityKnowledge and truthLovePower

About Deborah Harkness

Deborah Harkness is an American historian of science and medicine whose fiction draws closely on her scholarly interest in magic, knowledge, and the early modern world. She made her fiction debut with A Discovery of Witches, the opening novel of the All Souls trilogy, and has continued to develop its supernatural history through related books including Time’s Convert. Her characteristic method is to place the habits of scholarship inside fantasy: historians become protagonists, libraries and manuscripts drive the action, and research opens onto hidden communities of witches, vampires, and daemons. Shadow of Night carries this approach into Elizabethan London, while Time’s Convert uses the American Revolution to examine liberty alongside the traditions and obligations of an ancient family. Across the series, Harkness combines atmospheric historical settings, romance, and elaborate supernatural world-building. What distinguishes the work is the way archival inquiry and intellectual history function as active parts of the imagined world, connecting private relationships with larger questions about power, inheritance, and the uses of knowledge.

Series

All Souls Trilogy · Book 1

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Viking
Language: English
ISBN: 9780670022410

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