A deeply unsettling story of obsessive friendship, dark magic and the ways in which we mythologise our past When a young man arrives in Cambridge as a first-year student, everything about him marks him as 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 partier 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 the influence he wields? Or is his mastery dependent on a much darker and dangerous power?