ENGLISH BOOKS

The first shadows fall on a Friday afternoon when a single, dying raven delivers an invitation to the witch, Diana Bishop. It calls her home to the hallowed ground of Ravenswood, to a place and a family she has never known.

And when Diana and her husband Matthew Clairmont learn that their seven-year-old twins must have their magical powers tested, Diana decides to forge a new future for her family, hoping to find answers at the Proctor ancestral home.

There, Diana becomes her great aunt Gwyneth's pupil in Higher Magic. And as Diana walks an unknown path, she must journey to some of the darkest places within her family history - and herself - if she is to unlock greater power.

It begins with absence and desire. It begins with blood and fear. It begins with a discovery of witches.
A world of witches, daemons and vampires.

A manuscript which holds the secrets of their past and the key to their future.

Diana and Matthew - the forbidden love at the heart of it.

When historian Diana Bishop opens an alchemical manuscript in the Bodleian Library, it's an unwelcome intrusion of magic into her carefully ordered life. Though Diana is a witch of impeccable lineage, the violent death of her parents while she was still a child convinced her that human fear is more potent than any witchcraft. Now Diana has unwittingly exposed herself to a world she's kept at bay for years; one of powerful witches, creative, destructive daemons and long-lived vampires.

Sensing the significance of Diana's discovery, the creatures gather in Oxford, among them the enigmatic Matthew Clairmont, a vampire geneticist.

Diana is inexplicably drawn to Matthew and, in a shadowy world of half-truths and old enmities, ties herself to him without fully understanding the ancient line they are crossing. As they begin to unlock the secrets of the manuscript and their feelings for each other deepen, so the fragile balance of peace unravels…