For all my fellow fans of the All Souls World, but especially fans of Shadow of Night. Here is a reading list I started after i first finished the All Souls Trilogy, when I began to want more fiction set in that slightly alternate and very magical 16th century London Deborah Harkness created. This is a list books I loved and have to share.
Strange Devices of the Sun and Moon by Lisa Goldstein:
Elizabethan London of 1590 is an intense city, overflowing with life and action, a city of spies and booksellers, alchemists and playwrights, poets, witches, plague and salvation. A series of strange events links the lives of St. Paul bookseller Alice Wood, the great writer Christopher Marlowe, the Faerie Queen as her court invades London to wage war amidst the intrigues of Queen Elizabeth I’s own court, as well as in the streets and courtyards among the unseeing populace. They are in search of a boy claiming to be the reborn King Arthur. Marlowe must become in effect a detective, and Alice, strangely favored by the fairies, must become a heroine in a struggle against evil forces, culminating in a magnificent battle fought in the heart of London.
What to Love:
History
16th century London: 1590
Christopher Marlow and Thomas Kyd
St. Paul’s Bookstalls, book selling rights
Fae London, Seelie and Unseelie court intrigue and war.
Alice Wood, a female member of London’s Stationer’s Guild: rare!
Scientist, mathematician, and court astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I, John Dee is also one of the sixteenth-century's most renowned alchemists, he is driven by a passion to fathom the elemental secrets of the cosmos. But when his reckless assistant, Edward Kelley, succeeds in using a crystal sphere to summon angels, Dee is catapulted into an awesome struggle that may extinguish the light of reason forever. One of the spirits invoked is a cunning demon who takes possession of Dee's young daughter, Katherine, and shows Dee a frightening vision of his own future.
Terrified by what has been foretold, Dee abruptly decides to close his house in London and flee to Europe with his long-suffering wife, Jane, and their two young children. Their desperate flight brings them at last to the city of Prague--a center of culture, knowledge, and learning, both sacred and profane, a gateway between the Eastern and Western worlds, and also, it is whispered, a door between our world and the world of the spirits. There, in the city's ancient streets, Dee encounters the mystic Rabbi Judah Loew, who enlists his aid in the creation of a Golem--a man fashioned from the clay--to defend the city's Jewish Quarter from persecution. And he asks Dee's help to avert a impending crisis that threatens to engulf the world. For ancient legends say that the fate of the world rests on shoulders of thirty-six righteous men. And if one of those righteous men dies before his time, the world will end and dark spirits will remake it in their own image.
What to Love:
History
16th Century London, Prague, and Krakow, Poland : 1582
John Dee, Edward Kelley, Empirer Rudolf II, Rabbi Judah Loew, Jane Dee
The Golem of Prague...PRAGUE!!
Angels, demons, demon possession, conversations with angels, alchemy, mysticism, apocalypses.
The School of Night by Alan Wall:
BBC editor Sean Tallow has only two overriding desires in life. One is to step into the shoes of his glamorous friend Daniel Pagett, and the other is to establish the truth about the School of Night, a shadowy group of Elizabethans who clustered around Sir Walter Raleigh.
Tallow pursues the School of Night and its entanglement in the question of whether the man from Stratford-upon-Avon could really have written the plays ascribed to William Shakespeare. If he didn't, then who did? The harder he studies, the less light is thrown on this troublesome question, and the more his interest in the School of Night becomes a grim fixation.
Just when it seems Tallow is ready to give up the quest, day becomes night and everything he once believed is turned on its head as he enters a fearful world where there are no longer any rules except survival. Like the original members of the School of Night, he finds himself treading on the wrong side of the law.
What to Love:
History
Theft
The School of Night
Sir Walter Raleigh, Thomas Hariot/Harriot, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare
Oxford, and Bradford England
A debate about who wrote Shakspeares plays.
The School of Night by Louis Bayard:
In the late sixteenth century, five brilliant scholars gather under the cloak of darkness to discuss God, politics, astronomy, and the black arts. Known as the School of Night, they meet in secret to avoid the wrath of Queen Elizabeth. But one of the men, Thomas Harriot, has secrets of his own, secrets he shares with one person only: the servant woman he loves.
In modern-day Washington, D.C., disgraced Elizabethan scholar Henry Cavendish has been hired by the ruthless antiquities collector Bernard Styles to find a missing letter. The letter dates from the 1600s and was stolen by Henry's close friend, Alonzo Wax. Now Wax is dead and Styles wants the letter back. But the letter is an object of interest to others, too. It may be the clue to a hidden treasure; it may contain a mysterious and long-sought alchemical formula; it most certainly will prove the existence of the group of men whom Shakespeare dubbed the School of Night but about whom little is known.
Joining Henry in his search for the letter is Clarissa Dale, a mysterious woman who suffers from visions that only Henry can understand. In short order, Henry finds himself stumbling through a secretive world of ancient perils, caught up in a deadly plot, and ensnared in the tragic legacy of a forgotten genius.
What to Love:
16Th/17th Century London
The Tower of London
The School of Night
Henry Percy aka They Wizard Earl aka Hal aka The Earl of Northhunbarland, Christopher ‘Kit’ Marlowe, Thomas Harriot/Hariot, Sir Walter Raleigh
A disgrace Elizaabethan scholar, mystery, treasure, alchemy, history, romance.
Veronica by Nicholas Christopher:
On a snowy night in February, at the improbable point in Lower Manhattan where Waverly Place intersects Waverly Place, a 30-year-old freelance photographer named Leo meets elusive, strangely beautiful Veronica, a magician's daughter and assistant, she leads him into a world where illusion blends seamlessly with reality—a luminously transformed city where powerful underground streams crisscross beneath the streets, a city of dragonpoints and Tibetan mysticism where real time is magically altered. Ten years have passed since Veronica’s father, the famous magician Albin White, disappeared while performing a dangerous feat of time travel before a packed theater audience.
White’s disappearance was no accident: he was sabotaged by his apprentice Starwood, who interfered at a critical moment and sent him hurtling into the past, free to explore other eras but with no means of returning to the present. Veronica and a small group of family and friends have spent the last 10 years preparing to bring her father back from his limbo, and the bewildered Leo will be an important part of their perilous plan.
What to Love:
New York
Time Travel
The School of Night
Magic, magicians, Tibetan Mysticism, Illusion
The Bones of Avalon by Phil Rickman:
A country divided. A newly crowned, desperately vulnerable young queen. Can one man uncover the secret that will save her throne?
It is 1560, and Elizabeth Tudor has been on the throne for a year. Dr. John Dee, at 32 already acclaimed throughout Europe, is her astrologer and consultant in the hidden arts… a controversial appointment in these days of superstition and religious strife.
When dangerous questions of Elizabeth's legitimacy arise, the mild, bookish Dee finds himself summoned before William Cecil, who tasks him with an important mission. Along with Robert Dudley, Dee's daring friend and former student who is also rumored to be the Queen's secret lover, Dee must travel to the famously mystical town of Glastonbury to find the missing bones of King Arthur. Once these long-lost relics, the embodiment of a legacy vitally important to the Tudor line, are ensconced in London, doubts as to the Queen's supremacy as the rightful Tudor heir will be dispelled.
But the quest quickly turns deadly—Dee and Dudley arrive in Glastonbury to discover the town mourning the gruesome execution of its abbot, and more death soon follows at the old abbey. Racing to uncover the secrets buried there, Dee finds himself caught in the tangled roots of English magic, unexpected violence, the breathless stirring of first love… and the cold heart of a complex plot against Elizabeth.
Sequel: The Heresy of Dr. Dee
What to Love:
16th century Elizabethan London: 1560
John Dee, Queen Elizabeth I, Robert Dudley, William Cecil
A blending true events with fiction, this historical thriller a page-turning murder mystery set on the sixteenth-century Oxford University campus.
Giordano Bruno was a monk, poet, scientist, and magician on the run from the Roman Inquisition on charges of heresy for his belief that the Earth orbits the sun and that the universe is infinite. This alone could have gotten him burned at the stake, but he was also a student of occult philosophies and magic.
Bruno's pursuit of this rare knowledge brings him to London, where he is unexpectedly recruited by Queen Elizabeth I and is sent undercover to Oxford University on the pretext of a royal visitation. Officially Bruno is to take part in a debate on the Copernican theory of the universe; unofficially, he is to find out whatever he can about a Catholic plot to overthrow the queen.
His mission is dramatically thrown off course by a series of grisly murders and a spirited and beautiful young woman. As Bruno begins to discover a pattern in these killings, he realizes that no one at Oxford is who he seems to be. Bruno must attempt to outwit a killer who appears obsessed with the boundary between truth and heresy.
Sequels: Prophecy, Sacrilege, Treachery, Conspiracy, and short story The Secret Dead
What to Love:
16th Century London and Oxford
History
Giordano Bruno, William Cecil, Francis Wallsingham, Elizabeth I
A historical novel about the most unlikely of lovers, interwoven with the mysticism of the Jewish occult. The Book of Splendor is novel that brings to life the experience of the Jewish community during a period of oppression and rebirth in seventeenth-century Prague. This is an adventure-filled romance stocked with court intrigue and political tension, including the machinations of the rival Ottoman Empire, the religious controversies of Protestantism, and the constant threat of violence to the Jewish community. At the heart of the novel is Rochel, a bastard seamstress who escapes poverty through an arranged marriage to the tailor Zev, but falls in love with Yossel, the Golem created by Rabbi Loew to protect the Jewish community. Meanwhile, Emperor Rudolph II puts the safety of all Prague at risk in his mad bid for an elixir of immortality.
What to Love:
History
16th/17th century Prague: 1601
John Dee, Edward Kelley, Rabbi Loew, The Golem of Prague, Mad Emperor Rudolph II
Alchemy, Jewish Occult lore, mysticism, court intrigue, political tension, romance
Descriptions mostly from Goodreads
If anyone else has any books they have found, please do share!!! These are just the ones I have found, loved and needed everyone to know about. This is a short list, and I do have more, but it’s a great start if you are hungry while waiting for more ADOW. Tell me what you think!
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