Book Review: The Oxford Inheritance

“This was an odd, timeless place, a city out of step with the rest of the world, where walking down an empty backstreet along the snaking line of an ancient college’s walls, Cassie could almost forget which century she was in – until a cluster of noisy undergrads spilled out of some back-alley pub, with their modern fashions and noisy buzz of cell phones breaking the spell.”

Oxford: renowned. Ancient. Privileged. When American transfer student Cassie Blackwell arrives, she’s in the perfect position to notice just how strange and formal a world it is. Like her fellow classmates, she’s there to learn – but she has something more on her mind than the syllabus. Her mother – beautiful, troubled, wild – was once a student here, something she never revealed to Cassie when she was alive, and now Cassie’s determined to find out what made her flee to the States, change her name, and adopt a nomadic lifestyle.

Through her roommate she becomes friends with some of the most privileged students on campus – the kind of elite that will rule the country and even the world one day. But there’s something sinister about them, even as she finds herself drawn into their web. This modern-day gothic novel is an addictive page-turner, with a subtle commentary on privilege and the British class system. Ann A McDonald (previously writing as Abby McDonald) draws on her own experience of Oxford to bring this secret-society thriller to life.