I wanted to be an Inkling, drinking pints and having fascinating conversations in The Bird and Baby (officially The Eagle and Child) in Oxford with Tolkien, Lewis, and the poet Charles Williams. Oxford was my Mecca for a good twenty years of my formative imaginative life. It was as if you'd taken all the books and places and things that I most loved, and stirred them into something entirely new and unique. For consistency's sake we're using the British version of my nickname and the American version of Deb's, although we both answer to either.)

(And the parallel names were a nice touch, too.

Deborah Harkness- DEB from this point on-has created literary magic, a world the reader won't want to leave.ĭEBS (DEBORAH CROMBIE): I had the oddest feeling of parallelism when I read A Discovery of Witches. I barely put the book down from beginning to end, and when I finished it I picked it up and started over. Magic, science, Oxford, France, enchanted books, a gripping love story, and the highest stakes-the balance of the world as we know it. A first novel that casts a singular spell.”Īs indeed it does. An irresistible tale of wizardry, science and forbidden love, Discovery will leave you longing for the sequel. a wonderfully imaginative grown-up fantasy with all the magic of Harry Potter or Twilight.

PEOPLE MAGAZINE calls A Discovery of Witches '. But her life takes an unexpected twist when she encounters an enchanted manuscript in the Bodleian Library, along with the interest of a very sexy vampire named Matthew Clairmont who also happens to be a geneticist. She is also a witch, descended from one of the preeminent families of Salem witches, who has refused to use her powers. The heroine, Diana Bishop, is a scholar, an American on an extended stay in Oxford studying ancient manuscripts on the history of science. I read A Discovery of Witches on the recommendation of my editor, and was. She also writes a popular wine blog, Good Wine Under $2o. Her previous books were non-fiction and include John Dee’s Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution.

The surprise? Deborah Harkness is an academic, an historian who teaches European history and the history of science at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. And now both A Discovery of Witches and its upcoming sequel have been optioned by Warner Brothers for films. It debuted at #2 on the New York Times list-a buzz indeed for a first novel. DEBORAH CROMBIE: If you've been in a bookstore since February, looked at books online or read reviews, it will come as no surprise that Deborah Harkness's A DISCOVERY OF WITCHES is one of the publishing sensations of the year, if not the decade.

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