Diana Bishop journeys to the darkest places within herself - and her family history - in the highly anticipated fifth novel of the beloved Number One Sunday Times bestselling All Souls series. Deborah Harkness first introduced the world to Diana Bishop, Oxford scholar and witch, and vampire geneticist Matthew de Clairmont in A Discovery of Witches . Drawn to each other despite long-standing taboos, these two other-worldly beings found themselves at the centre of a battle for a lost, enchanted manuscript known as Ashmole 782. Since then, they have fallen in love, travelled to Elizabethan England, dissolved the Covenant between the three species, and awoken the dark powers within Diana''s family line. Now, Diana and Matthew 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 . 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.

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Deborah Harkness is the number one Sunday Times bestselling author of A Discovery of Witches, Shadow of Night, The Book of Life, Time's Convert and The World of All Souls. A history professor at the University of Southern California, Harkness has received Fulbright, Guggenheim, and National Humanities Center fellowships. She lives in Los Angeles.

Follow Deborah Harkness on Twitter @DebHarkness and Instagram @debharkness, and visit www.deborahharkness.com and www.facebook.com/AuthorDeborahHarkness

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'Haunting in every way. A story thick with family secrets, human heartache, and the kind of deep magic only Harkness can conjure. You will be enchanted' LEIGH BARDUGO

'The Black Bird Oracle deftly explores the nexus of memory, history, and parenthood - the magic, pain, and promises mothers pass onto their children. Harkness's lush prose makes a fantastical world real enough to touch' JODI PICOULT
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Diana Bishop journeys to the darkest places within herself - and her family history - in the highly anticipated fifth novel of the beloved Number One Sunday Times bestselling All Souls series.**

The first shadows fall on a Friday afternoon when a single, dying raven lands on the pavement in front of Diana Bishop, harbinger of an invitation that reads, 'It's time you came home, Diana'.

Diana is a witch and scholar; her husband Matthew Clairmont, a vampire. Their intense love for one another awoke the dark powers within her and dissolved the Covenant between the three species - Witch, Daemon and Vampire - that live alongside humans. Now, the governing Congregation has decided it must test the magical powers of their seven-year-old twins, Pip and Becca. Concerned with their safety, Diana decides to forge a different path for her family's future and travels to Ravenswood, the Proctor family home.

There, Diana begins a new era, becoming her great aunt Gwyneth's pupil in higher magic. It's time to confront her family's past - and her own, inescapable desire for greater power.

Number One bestselling author Deborah Harkness returns to her beloved All Souls world with a triumphant novel that sweeps back to the Salem Panic and illuminates Diana's family history in new and thrilling ways.