Entertainment Weekly’s 2011 preview included a blurb about the forthcoming, debut novel, A Discovery of Witches, by Deborah Harkness, with a review by Karen Valby out shortly after.

When she published The Jewel House with YUP, a scientific history of Elizabethan London, The New Yorker wrote: “Harkness’s research is revelatory and her taste for the offbeat enthralling.” Original novels are not our thing, though we do have quite a few in translation, so the new book is with Penguin. Now, drawing on her life as a scholar and writing with “thrilling gusto,” Harkness creates a magical world with a Yale historian (!) and witch, Diana Bishop, who catches a vampire’s eye while rummaging around an Oxford library. In either case, fiction or nonfiction, it’s clear that Harkness is a true writer.