Synopsis:
After years of caring for her dying mother, Martha Shaw feels empty, exhausted, and far older than her twenty-six years. So when her brother invites her to a weekend getaway at the opulent, two-hundred-acre country estate where his friend works, Martha reluctantly agrees. After all, what’s the harm? The owners and all their staff will be gone. Security cameras will be off. The house will be theirs. For the first time in years, Martha might actually have fun.
And it is fun, taking advantage of the historic mega-mansion and its vast grounds. Martha begins to feel human again. But when night falls, the rightful master of Newbourne Park returns—and she’s not alone. Suddenly, being caught trespassing is the least of their worries, because what steps out into the moonlight is something vicious. And hungry.
What began as a lark becomes a bloody battle for survival, where greed and morality collide—and a woman must choose to bow, break, or bite back.
Review:
Bloody and decadent, Jennifer Thorne’s “Newbourne Park,” is a cut-throat study of power, privilege and lycanthropy. For fans of “Ready Or Not,” and for those who thought that Jennifer Lynn Barnes’ “The Inheritance Games,” was seriously lacking in the werewolf department, this high-society horror is catnip. It begins with teeth and then throats go in Thorne’s stunning, grand-guignol, froth-mouthed and snarling fight-for-survival opening, but the carnage in this book is not just carnage, “Newbourne Park,” first and foremost a poignant commentary upon entitlement, status and the seduction of it. It’s sick and gorgeous. Having savoured “Lute,” and “Diavola,” I can’t say I was surprised to enjoy Thorne’s latest, but with its sumptuous prose and perversely lavish debauchery, “Newbourne Park,” has cemented her as one of the best in my mind. This one is out September 29th from Titan in the UK and Putnam in the US.
We follow Martha, who during the slow process of her mother’s death lost most everything. Her Oxford offer, prospects, friends. This is how she found herself squatting at Newbourne Park for a weekend of stolen grandeur… or a poorly disguised double date with her brother Ian, his girlfriend Lucy, and Tommy.. Their weekend of living it up is quickly foiled however when the lady of the house returns early and changed, with a cohort of…similarly afflicted friends, the manor house a gilded cage that the group can only hope to escape alive. After a fangtastically written tussle, Martha leaves Newbourne bruised, battered and disgraced, but also changed herself…
I enjoyed Martha as our narrator. The opening of the novel is theatrical, our antihero boastful, grandiose and angsty, but this pretty strong impression is contradicted by the mildly hopeful, slightly sheepish Martha we get properly acquainted with when we turn the page, the two appearing to have only met in passing. This story is thus not simply about transformation in the sense of fur and fangs, but about Martha’s becoming the woman who tells it. A liturgical fall from grace, each chapter arrives under the heading of a ‘sin,’ beginning of course with trespassing, and getting bloodier from there, and slowly but surely, we watch Martha step into the haute, but admittedly indomitable shoes she now dons.
“Newbourne Park,” pulls no punches with its commentary on class and plutocracy. The overwhelming, exasperated sentiment being, to quote the aforementioned “Ready Or Not,” that I love so much, “Fuckin’ rich people.” A werewolf story is the perfect vessel to deliver such a message. Thorne has not only a lot to say about wealth itself, but entitlement too, privilege to the point where outside struggle is complete abstraction. It does not romanticise poverty and conflate it with virtue, but certainly recognises the 1%’s warped relationship with consequence- a lethal combination alongside…apex predation. Newbourne reeks conspicuously of excess, it’s settled into the carpets like cat piss- and whilst beautiful things, fine art and expensive clothing may be everywhere, what they represent, accumulation, insulation and entitlement is less admirable. The result is a rather visceral meditation on power, appetite and privilege.
A ruthless novel that will have you wondering what on earth really goes on inside those national trust properties, Jennifer Thorne’s “Newbourne Park,” will delight fans of Rachel Harrison’s “Such Sharp Teeth,” and Saltburn.
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