You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
Headline has signed The Black Bird Oracle, the fifth instalment in the All Souls series in a three-book deal, from Deborah Harkness.
Mari Evans, managing director, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights to three novels and a series of novellas from Julian Alexander at The Soho Agency, acting on behalf of the Park & Fine Literary and Media. The Black Bird Oracle will be published simultaneously in the UK and US with Ballantine on 16th July 2024.
The All Souls series, beginning with A Discovery of Witches, follows Oxford scholar and witch Diana Bishop and vampire geneticist Matthew de Clairmont. Since the beginning of the series the pair have fallen in love, travelled Elizabethan England, dissolved the Covenant between the three species and awoken dark powers in Diana’s family line.
In The Black Bird Oracle Diana and Matthew must test the magic of their seven-year-old twins. The synopsis continues: "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."
Evans commented: "When The Black Bird Oracle landed in my inbox, I was beside myself with delight – here, at last, we learn about Diana’s Proctor ancestry for the first time and begin to realise the true extent of her powers. The novel teems with rich texture, glorious colour, jeopardy and – of course – magic, the spells leaping from the page. And it wouldn’t be a Deborah Harkness novel without the accompanying taut, compelling historical context, here taking us right back to the Salem Panic. I can’t wait for fans of the All Souls novels to discover this glorious new episode in their beloved series, it’s pure wish fulfilment on the page."