A Discovery of Witches

A Discovery of Witches is the first All Souls novel and the debut of the American scholar Deborah Harkness, published in 2011. It is a historical fantasy in which witches, daemons and vampires have coexisted for centuries under a truce that is now thinner than it used to be, in which each species keeps its own rules about who may marry whom, and in which the study of the past is a form of detective work.

Diana Bishop is a historian of science who teaches at Yale and is conducting research at Oxford, and she is a witch by lineage whether she likes it or not. Since her parents died when she was seven she has kept her magic at arm's length, has not trained in it, and has minimised her contact with other witches. That arrangement ends when she calls up an alchemical manuscript in the Bodleian Library, which the library has not seen in centuries.

The manuscript has been missing for centuries and half the supernatural world has been hunting it, so every creature in Oxford notices when Diana finds it. Among them is Matthew Clairmont, a vampire geneticist who is at least as interested in Diana as he is in the book. Working out what the manuscript is draws them closer together, and the closer they get the more obvious it becomes that a witch and a vampire doing research together crosses a line with consequences, and that neither of their families is likely to approve.

The series continues in Shadow of Night and The Book of Life, and the first novel establishes Diana, Matthew, the manuscript and the three species whose separate rules govern their courtship. Harkness writes the research as part of the plot, with the library work and the romance running through the same scenes, and the later books continue the same story with the same leads.