A Discovery of Witches
A historian who refuses to use her magic calls up a manuscript in the Bodleian that every creature in Europe has been looking for, and a fifteen-hundred-year-old vampire geneticist arrives to see it. Academic, unhurried, and very interested in wine. On the House's scale it rates 2 for spice (warm), 4 for how much of the book is the romance, and 4 for craft. Readers who want a possessive vampire and a completed trilogy at a low spice level.
Last reviewed
How it rates
- Author
- Deborah Harkness
- Series
- All Souls, book 1 of 3 · series complete
- Spice
- Spice 2 out of 5, Warm2/5 · Warm
- Romance
- 4/5
- Plot
- 3/5
- Worldbuilding
- 4/5
- Darkness
- 2/5
- Writing craft
- 4/5
- Burn
- Slow burn
- Point of view
- first person
- Ending
- Happy ever after · cliffhanger
- Setting
- Oxford, and a French château with a long memory
- Audience
- Adult
- Pages
- 664
On the spice rating Restrained for most of the first book, with a slow escalation across the trilogy. How the scale works.
Content warnings violence, abduction, torture, miscarriage.
Tropes in this book
What to read after A Discovery of Witches
Chosen by hand rather than computed, and each one rated on the same scales.
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How we checked this
Ratings on this page are editorial judgement applied on a published scale, not aggregated reader scores. Factual details were checked against the sources below and last reviewed on .