Published in 2024
336 pages
By day, Kate van der Borgh is a freelance copywriter, and by night, she’s usually composing or playing music. She grew up in Lancashire and went on to study music at Cambridge, so there’s a reasonable amount of her in her narrator—including the fact that she was a pianist and reluctant bassoonist. She has, however, never had reason to suspect that her best friend has occult powers. Her short fiction has been published by The Fiction Desk, and she’s a graduate of Faber’s six-month Writing a Novel course. She is based in London.
What is this book about?
In the hallowed halls of Cambridge, a dangerous obsession takes hold…
When a young man arrives in Cambridge as a first-year student, he finds himself an outsider. There’s the punting and the politics, the wine and the waistcoats, all seemingly familiar to everyone but him. Then he falls under the spell of Bryn Cavendish.
A notorious party boy and skilled magician, Bryn is magnetic. To be in his circle is to revel in clouds of ecstasy, untouched by the rules. To be exiled from it is to haunt the peripheries of campus life like a ghost.
As the academic year intensifies and Bryn’s magic tricks become more sinister, one question lingers. Is Bryn’s charisma the source of his influence or does he wield a much darker and more dangerous power?
