The Book of Magic: A Novel (4) (The Practical Magic Series)

Product Description
Master storyteller Alice Hoffman brings us the conclusion of the Practical Magic series in a spellbinding and enchanting final Owens novel brimming with lyric beauty and vivid characters.

The Owens family has been cursed in matters of love for over three-hundred years but all of that is about to change. The novel begins in a library, the best place for a story to be conjured, when beloved aunt Jet Owens hears the deathwatch beetle and knows she has only seven days to live. Jet is not the only one in danger—the curse is already at work.

A frantic attempt to save a young man’s life spurs three generations of the Owens women, and one long-lost brother, to use their unusual gifts to break the curse as they travel from Paris to London to the English countryside where their ancestor Maria Owens first practiced the Unnamed Art. The younger generation discovers secrets that have been hidden from them in matters of both magic and love by Sally, their fiercely protective mother. As Kylie Owens uncovers the truth about who she is and what her own dark powers are, her aunt Franny comes to understand that she is ready to sacrifice everything for her family, and Sally Owens realizes that she is willing to give up everything for love.

The Book of Magic is a breathtaking conclusion that celebrates mothers and daughters, sisters and brothers, and anyone who has ever been in love.
Review
“Delightfully witchy… Alluring on its own, it’s also a satisfying end to a timeless saga.” —
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW,
Editor’s Choice 

“Some stories begin at the beginning and others begin at the end.” So opens
The Book of Magic, the final installment of Alice Hoffman’s popular
Practical Magic series, a page-turning fairy tale of a saga that spans three books, one star-studded movie adaptation and multiple centuries of adventure and misadventure, love lost and found and bottomless cauldrons of sorcery in the lives of the bewitchingly witchy Owens family….like the witches who populate her stories, Hoffman certainly knows how to enchant.” 
—NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

“Alice Hoffman has given us such a gift with this series, and this final chapter is sure to be another heartfelt celebration of mothers and daughters and the magic of falling in love.” 
—LITHUB

“I love Alice Hoffman. Full of Hoffman’s bewitching and lucid prose and vivid characters,
The Book of Magic is ultimately about the very human magic of family and love and actions that echo through generations. Filled with secrets and splendor and light and dark, the novel works as well as a stand-alone as it does as a conclusion to a mesmerizing series. It casts a spell.” 
—
MATT HAIG,
 New York Times best-selling author of The Midnight Library
About the Author
Alice Hoffman is the author of more than thirty works of fiction, including 
Magic Lessons, 
The World That We Knew, 
Practical Magic, 
The Rules of Magic, the Oprah’s Book Club selection 
Here on Earth, 
The Red Garden, 
The Dovekeepers, 
The Museum of Extraordinary Things, 
The Marriage of Opposites, and 
Faithful. She lives near Boston.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter I

I.

Some stories begin at the beginning and others begin at the end, but all the best stories begin in a library. It was there that Jet Owens saw her fate in a mirror behind the reference desk. Even in her eighties, Jet was still beautiful. Each day she washed with the black soap the family prepared in March during the dark phase of the moon, with every bar then wrapped in crinkly cellophane. Jet had no aches or pains and had never been ill a day in her life, but fate is fate and it can often be what you least expect it to be. On this day, when the daffodils had begun to bloom, Jet saw that she had seven days to live.

The deathwatch beetle had begun to call from within the walls of the Owens Library, a sound that often went unnoticed until it was so loud it was all a p