Book One – College of Shadows

Some doors in Cambridge were locked for a reason.

 

Working-class and a long way from the Mansfield of his childhood, Nick Wood doesn't belong among the dreaming spires. He knows it, too. But not fitting in becomes the least of his fears the night something steps out of the shadows of his college and attacks him. Something that should not exist.

​

Nick isn't the only one who senses the university is hiding something. Annabel has been quietly unravelling since the sudden death of her sister, and she has begun to fear that her own misfortune is more than bad luck. As the two of them are drawn together with an unlikely circle of friends, they stumble on a truth Cambridge has kept buried for generations: a door to somewhere that should have stayed shut.

​

The further they go, the darker it grows. And by the time freshers' week draws to its close, the price of what they have uncovered may be greater than any of them can pay.

​

College of Shadows is the first novel in the Cambridge Gothic series. Atmospheric, warm-hearted dark academia, steeped in the real Cambridge and its shadows, it is for readers who love Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London and Jodi Taylor's Chronicles of St Mary's, and for anyone who has ever wondered what might be waiting behind the locked doors of an ancient college.