Now that A Discovery of Witches is on Netflix, viewers worldwide are falling for the love story of witch Diana Bishop and vampire Matthew Clairmont. The drama is based on Deborah Harkness’s All Souls Trilogy, and each season is drawn from the first three books.
Since the show concluded, however, fans have been clamoring for more A Discovery of Witches, and they’re now in luck because just this summer, Harkness returned to her series and published The Black Bird Oracle, which picks up seven years after the show (and the third novel, The Book of Life: A Novel) concludes.
“I wanted to return to magic and tidy up some of the loose ends and fill some of the plot holes I’d left in the previous books,” Harkness told the New York Times. “After the challenges of the pandemic, I thought it might be good to pay more attention to how people cope with the difficulties that confront them, too, and not just focus on the bright side.”
The Black Bird Oracle: A Novel (All Souls Series Book 5)
What happens in A Black Bird Oracle? Diana and Matthew are still happily married, raising their twins. The book begins, however, when they “receive a formal demand from the Congregation: They must test the magic of their seven-year-old twins, Pip and Rebecca. Concerned with their safety and desperate to avoid the same fate that led her parents to spellbind her, Diana decides to forge a different path for her family’s future and answers a message from a great-aunt she never knew existed, Gwyneth Proctor, whose invitation simply reads: It’s time you came home, Diana.”
The blurb continues: “On the hallowed ground of Ravenswood, the Proctor family home, and under the tutelage of Gwyneth, a talented witch grounded in higher magic, a new era begins for Diana: a confrontation with her family’s dark past and a reckoning for her own desire for even greater power—if she can let go, finally, of her fear of wielding it. In this stunning new novel, grand in scope, Deborah Harkness deepens the beloved world of All Souls with powerful new magic and long-hidden secrets, and the path Diana finds at Ravenswood leads to the most consequential moments yet in this cherished series.”
Catch up on the entire All Souls series here:
Emily Burack (she/her) is the Senior News Editor for Town & Country, where she covers entertainment, culture, the royals, and a range of other subjects. Before joining T&C, she was the deputy managing editor at Hey Alma, a Jewish culture site. Follow her @emburack on Twitter and Instagram.