Shadow of Night

Shadow of Night is a historical-fantasy novel by the American scholar and writer Deborah Harkness, published in 2012 and the second book of the All Souls trilogy.

The time travel is handled as a research problem rather than a spectacle: the pair arrive in 1590, and the first difficulties are clothes, money, disease and the rules of behaviour by which anyone who is out of place in Elizabethan England is quickly noticed. Matthew's friends, a group of writers, scientists and spies who call themselves the School of Night, provide most of the plot and the danger, and Diana's search for a teacher takes her into a magic she has deliberately avoided for years. Harkness had studied the Tudor period and had published a non-fiction book about the scientific revolution in Elizabethan London, and the novel's pleasure comes from the same material being put to work in fiction, with real figures and real streets in the background. It became a New York Times bestseller on publication in July 2012, and reviews were divided about the size of its cast, with some readers finding the number of secondary characters hard to follow.