A Discovery of Witches

I have my friend Betsy Friedman to thank for beating me about the head -- uh I mean persuading me to read this book. It's the first book I've read in a long time where I had to force myself to put it down at night and turn out the lights to go to sleep. Rich, interesting settings and characters, including a house that communicates its wishes with groans and slamming doors, hides secrets until they need to be revealed, and spontaneously adds rooms when it's expecting guests. Obviously it is about witches, but also about vampires and daemons and how they have and have not gotten along--for centuries.  Author Deborah Harkness is a history professor at USC and has created two characters also steeped in history. The main witch character, Diana Bishop, is a historian of science, specifically interested in those who pursued alchemy. She has fought her witchy heritage all her life, believing both that it played a significant role in the brutal murder of her parents when she was aged seven, and that she needed to prove to herself that she could achieve academic credibility without using magic. And she largely succeeded at not using magic, until one day she calls up an old alchemical manuscript  from the stacks in Oxford's Bodleian Library and unwittingly unleashes pent-up floods of political maneuvering among the three groups of non-human creatures. An unlikely protector appears in the form of Matthew Clairmont--physician, professor, and ancient vampire, who has lived hundreds of years of history.  Their relationship may be the catalyst for an all-out creature war, or even an evolutionary tipping point. It becomes apparent to one and all that history and magical forces have been leading to this union for a very long time and yet there are those who will stop at nothing to make sure they do not survive together. I can hardly wait to read the sequel, Shadow of Night.