When We Were Monsters is the compulsive new thriller from multimillion-selling NYT bestselling author JENNIFER NIVEN. Read on for an extract.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Eight students walk into an exclusive writers’ retreat, but only one will walk out with a life-changing opportunity to realise their creative dreams.
Effy is piecing together a story about the tragic betrayal that led to her mother’s death. Arlo hopes to publish a novel – but he’s also trying to start a new chapter with Effy after he broke her heart and ghosted her three years earlier.
Their mentor is Meredith Graffam, enigmatic writer, director and actress, whose compelling accounts of her own near-death experience on the same retreat decades before continue to spark controversy.
But this celebrated teacher is not all she seems, and her students gradually realize they are fighting for something much more primal than academic advantage. As Graffam’s unorthodox teaching methods push them past breaking point, they reveal their darkest secrets, take unthinkable risks and slowly start to turn on one another. But Graffam never expected they would turn on her . . .
EXTRACT
The day before we kill Meredith Graffam is calm and blue. Like Massachusetts in summer after the rain. The scent of earth and f lowers and fresh, clean air. Just a perfect sunlit day.
None of us will walk into the forest that night planning to commit murder. It’s easy when you’re surrounded by beauty and opulence and acres of privilege, when you’re young and filled with possibility, to convince yourself that life will always be as rose-coloured as this and nothing can go wrong.
At the end of a long, sweeping drive, lined by the tallest trees, surrounded by forest and the sea just beyond, lies the campus of Brighton and Hove. The student body is, for the most part – present company excluded – comprised of the off- spring of the very rich and the highly accomplished who can afford to send them anywhere but choose to send them here, to the woods of northeastern Massachusetts.
But like every too-bright place, darkness lingers at its edges. The wizard behind the curtain. The painting in the attic. Hyde. It’s there in the hazing of first-years that occurs each fall. In the ruthless competition among students. In the surrounding forest, where, each January for 16 days, eight of the school’s best and brightest are handpicked to live and study with someone world-famous and world-renowned at the Moss, the rambling old home of Moss Hove, our founder.
We don’t have secret societies at Brighton and Hove. In- stead we have Jan Term, its own elite, slightly nerdier organisation of students past and present – our equivalent of being tapped. Everyone eager for the illustrious, powerful connections it promises outside these halls. In our real lives. In our future lives.
Built in 1916, the Moss sits surrounded by 10 000 acres of pristine forestland – formally known as Murton Wood, informally as Murder Wood – with whole swaths of primeval trees and miles of unpaved roads, all of it owned by the school. Unless they’re lucky enough to be chosen for Jan Term, most students don’t wander too deep into Murton. A 17-year-old student was killed there in 1995, a tragedy – a blemish – the school has never forgotten.
Proving that bad things can happen anywhere, even on a campus as beautiful as Brighton and Hove. Even on a crisp, star-filled January evening. Even to the four of us.
Effy, the orphan, who doesn’t believe in ghosts but is haunted by them.
Isaac, the legacy, who carries the world on his shoulders. Vanessa, the wallflower, who never thought she belonged.
And Arlo, the prodigal son, who returned to the school he walked away from two years earlier.
We were just four individual people before Meredith Graffam, the Meredith Graffam, arrived at Brighton and Hove. She was the one who brought us together. And the one who tried to tear us apart.
Tomorrow she will die.
I will wish for today, the day before, this bright, calm, blue day, like Massachusetts in summer after the rain. Or better yet, three weeks before. The beginning of the new year, back when Graffam was still alive and I couldn’t think of anything to write because the only thing that had ever happened to me was too painful. I was anxious for material, for a story of my own. And now I have one.
Here it is.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo: © Justin Conway
Jennifer Niven is the author of the New York Times and international bestsellers All the Bright Places and Holding Up the Universe. Her books have been translated into 75 languages and have won literary awards around the world. She grew up in Indiana and now divides her time between Georgia and Los Angeles.
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