The Sunday Salon and Reading Anticipation (With Giveaways to Come…)!

Welcome to the Sunday Salon! It's the day of the week we virtually talk about that thing we love… READING! And finally, in Connecticut, we can step out of the house and not into a foot of snow! It's a beautiful sunny day here and it just makes me feel refreshed and ready for a new reading season! So let me ask you...

Do you get excited when you hear that a favorite author or series is coming out with a new book?! I do and so today I thought we'd talk about one such series that is wrapping up with the final chapter… Deborah Harkness's All Souls Trilogy! And what's even more fun is that the publisher is celebrating as well with a giveaway! And to top that is, you can enter the giveaway and read a guest post by Deb, right here starting June 6th! Don't miss it, it's going to be a blast!

So what is the All Souls Trilogy?! Take one part Anne Rice mix that with the Twilight series and a good helping of historical fiction, and you have an idea what you're in for with the All Souls Trilogy by Deborah Harkness. An enchanted manuscript, known as Ashmole 782, a reluctant witch and a sexy vampire…

A Discovery of Witches (Book 1)… "When historian Diana Bishop opens a bewitched alchemical manuscript in Oxford’s Bodleian Library it represents an unwelcome intrusion of magic into her carefully ordinary life. Though descended from a long line of witches, she is determined to remain untouched by her family’s legacy. She banishes the manuscript to the stacks, but Diana finds it impossible to hold the world of magic at bay any longer.

For witches are not the only otherworldly creatures living alongside humans. There are also creative, destructive daemons and long-lived vampires who become interested in the witch’s discovery. They believe that the manuscript contains important clues about the past and the future, and want to know how Diana Bishop has been able to get her hands on the elusive volume.

Chief among the creatures who gather around Diana is vampire Matthew Clairmont, a geneticist with a passion for Darwin. Together, Diana and Matthew embark on a journey to understand the manuscript’s secrets. But the relationship that develops between the ages-old vampire and the spellbound witch threatens to unravel the fragile peace that has long existed between creatures and humans—and will certainly transform Diana’s world as well."

Shadow of Night (Book 2)… "Book Two of the All Souls Trilogy plunges Diana and Matthew into  Elizabethan London, a world of spies and subterfuge, and a coterie of Matthew’s old friends, the mysterious School of Night.  The mission is to locate a witch to tutor  Diana and to find traces of Ashmole 782, but as the net of Matthew’s past tightens around them they embark on a very different journey, one that takes them into heart of the 1,500 year old vampire’s shadowed history and secrets. For Matthew Clairmont, time travel is no simple matter; nor is Diana’s search for the key to understanding her legacy.

Shadow of Night brings us a rich and splendid tapestry of alchemy, magic, and history, taking us through the loop of time to deliver a deepening love story, a tale of blood, passion, and the knotted strands of the past."

The Book of Life (Book 3!)…  "After traveling through time in Shadow of Night, the second book in Deborah Harkness’s enchanting series, historian and witch Diana Bishop and vampire scientist Matthew Clairmont return to the present to face new crises and old enemies. At Matthew’s ancestral home at Sept-Tours, they reunite with the cast of characters from A Discovery of Witches—with one significant exception. But the real threat to their future has yet to be revealed, and when it is, the search for Ashmole 782 and its missing pages takes on even more urgency. In the trilogy’s final volume, Harkness deepens her themes of power and passion, family and caring, past deeds and their present consequences. In ancestral homes and university laboratories, using ancient knowledge and modern science, from the hills of the Auvergne to the palaces of Venice and beyond, the couple at last learn what the witches discovered so many centuries ago."

I don't know where I was at the beginning of this trilogy, but I'm a good ways into book 1, A Discovery of Witches, and I am hooked! From the very beginning when I found myself in an old dusty library with Diana Bishop I did not want to come out! For a reader, who wouldn't love a story set among old dusty books. And even though Diana is a witch (she's a reluctant witch), this book doesn't seem to rely on that as its sole plot, there just feels like so much more substance to this story. More of a historical fiction feel with a bit of spice. So, if you haven't read this series you need to catch up! The Kindle version is only $2.99 right now for  A Discovery of Witches: A Novel (All Souls Trilogy, Book 1) and $4.99 for Shadow of Night: A Novel (All Souls Trilogy, Book 2). Book 3, The Book of Life comes out July 15th by Penguin Group, so you and I both have time to read up to the final chapter in the series.

I am lucky though, because I just received this series in the mail courtesy of Penguin Books! And I can't wait to share my thoughts after reading each book. But from the looks of it, I'm going to be liking this series A LOT! And I'm going to love participating in the celebration so some of my Chick with Books readers can win some cool stuff! OK… it's back to the books for me! You come back this week to learn more about those great giveaways!

Happy reading… Suzanne