A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

Vampires and witches in Oxford’s Bodleian Library? Whatever next? According to Diana Bishop, heroine of A Discovery of Witches, vampires prefer science labs (particle accelerators, decoding the genome and molecular biology) and aren’t often found in libraries — witches and daemons are far more typical.

Bishop was born a witch but is trying to give it up by concentrating on jogging and yoga. Visiting Oxford from the US to use the Bod, she finds a magical alchemical manuscript. “There were definitely two daemons in the music reference room,” we are told. “They’d looked up, dazed, as I walked by on the way to Blackwell’s for tea. One told me to bring him a latte.”

Harkness, herself a US academic, has obviously had tremendous fun writing this preposterous novel, and she makes the most of her knowledge of creepy old Oxford, gleaned when she was a research student here.

Diana has found an ‘Ashmole’ manuscript that could lead to the philosopher’s stone, but she is being watched by a vampire who’s tall, dark and handsome. She falls for dishy Matthew Clairmont, a biochemist and a neuroscientist who goes deer hunting with his best friend, a daemon (they met at Oxford) and treats Diana to fine wine from All Souls cellar.

The plot keeps you guessing for 590 pages of archane clues from Elizabethan alchemy and jokes about Halloween, weaving between a ludicrous present-day and an impressively authentic past. Diana may have stumbled on the missing link between magic and Darwinian evolution, in which case, her life is in deadly danger.

And at the end, there is a surprise — particularly for anyone who has seen the Creation Theatre’s current production of Kit Marlowe’s Faustus in the bowels of Blackwell’s. Kit, it turns out, was a personal friend of Diana’s pet vampire.

* The author will be at Blackwell's in Oxford at 4.30pm next Tuesday (March 8) and afterwards at Temple Cowley Library from 7.30pm.