The Book of Life

The Book of Life is a novel by the American scholar and writer Deborah Harkness, published in 2014. It is the third book in her All Souls trilogy.

Diana and Matthew come back to the present after their journey into the past, and the reunion is immediately overtaken by a death in the family and by the unfinished business of the manuscript, Ashmole 782, whose missing pages they have been hunting since the first novel. Diana has to work out how to live as a witch who has married a vampire, which their two species have spent centuries forbidding, and Matthew's research into the genetics of his own kind becomes a way of dismantling the rule rather than bending it. The novel moves between ancestral houses in France, laboratories in the United States, and the obligations of a family that measures its history in centuries. Harkness writes a world in which the supernatural creatures are also academics, and the research is as much of the plot as the pursuit.

It closes the trilogy, and it resolves its story through scholarship, politics and family rather than through a single confrontation.