Book Talk: A Discovery of Witches

"A Discovery of Witches" by Deborah Harkness is a fantasy novel set in current day England, France, and New York State. It begins in Oxford, where a scholar named Diana Bishop finds a lost manuscript called Ashmole 782 during her study of historical alchemy in The Bodleian library. Diana Bishop comes from two ancient lines of witches, and finds immediately that the manuscript is enchanted. Wanting nothing to do with magic she quickly takes some notes on Ashmole 782 and sends it back, not knowing that it's been lost for hundreds of years and contains information on the origins of all the creatures; Human, Vampire, Witch, and Daemon.
Diana Bishop is a historian, and though she is also a witch, she wants absolutely nothing to do with magic. When her aunt Sarah tried to teach her spells they would never work, and some things her mother did with magic frightened her when she was a child. Since human fear often leads to trouble for other creatures, witches daemons and vampires are meant to avoid one another. When together, they'll get noticed, and getting noticed never bodes well. Diana's parents were studying abroad in Africa when she was seven, and were murdered. The things other witches said at their funeral about how they had attracted too much attention made her turn away from magic entirely; seeing it as the reason for their death. By the age of 20 she had graduated collage. When she got a doctorate in history she had separated her self entirely from her family line of magic and passed as an ordinary human in everything but genes.
Shortly after her encounter with Ashmole 782 other creatures sense that it was found, and come to the library. One of them is the vampire Mathew DeClarmont, who specializes in genetics. He invites her to dinner, saying that he's interested in her work, and she tuns him down saying that she has plans.  They don't get along right away, but after this he begins to sit in the same room as her  at the Bodleian, and the other creatures avoid them.

Throughout the events of the story, Diana is forced to bring magic back into her life, and learns far more about herself than would have otherwise. Mathew assumes the role of a sort of gaurdian soon after his appearance as people who are trying to find Ashmole 782 begin to threaten her, and thier relationship goes from there.

Personally I likes this book and the series that follows because it's extremely detailed. We learn in "A Discovery of Witches" what makes Human Witches Daemons and Vampires different in the genetic codeing, which is something that both interests me in general and is something that creates depth in the world of the story. Another really great thing in this is the characters and the relationship between Diana and Mathew. Everyone is written realisticly, which is very importent because no matter how good the plot of a story is, if the characters are bad it ruins everything.
A really memorable part of the story for me is the development of Diana and Mathew's relationship and how they were developed as characters together. I don't want to give anything away, so I won't go any further, but as a person who is driven to read books by the characters more than the plot, it's very satisfying.
I would recomend this book to people who enjoy fantasy elements, european history, and romantic subplots that don't overshadow the rest of the story.
I'm not going to try and convince you to go out and get this book, but if you are interested in it you should. "A Discovery of Witches" is the first book of the All Souls trilogy. The second book is "Shadow of Night", and the third is "The Book of Life". They come in French. I checked.