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“Wynfield’s Kingdom”

By:

Marina Julia Neary

A Tale of the London Slums.

Welcome to 1830s Bermondsey, London's most notorious slum, a land of gang wars, freak shows, and home to every depravity known to man.

Dr. Thomas Grant, a disgraced physician, adopts Wynfield, a ten-year old thief savagely battered by a gang leader for insubordination. The boy grows up to be a slender, idealistic opium addict who worships Victor Hugo. By day he steals and resells guns from a weapons factory. By night he amuses filthy crowds with his adolescent girlfriend--a fragile witch with wolfish eyes.

Wynfield senses that he has a purpose outside of his rat-infested kingdom; but he never guesses that he had been selected at birth to topple the British aristocracy.

About the Author

I am an award-winning historical essayist, multilingual arts & entertainment journalist, published poet, playwright, actress, dancer and choreographer. My historical tragicomedy Hugo in London featuring the adventures of the French literary genius in England during the Crimean War was produced in Greenwich in 2008. A sequel, Lady with a Lamp: an Untold Story of Florence Nightingale, is premiering in New York in the fall of 2009.

As a specialist on the obscure works of Victor Hugo, I have lectured at the French Alliance. My recently completed novel Wynfield's Kingdom, a narrative version of Hugo in London, represented by Sullivan Maxx Literary Agency, was published by Fireship Press.

In 2007 I was commissioned to collect and publish the memoirs of residents from an affluent retirement community in Stamford, CT. The project involved interviewing over forty senior citizens over the age of ninety. A new Connecticut-based leisure publication Norwalk Beat has recently brought me on board as a contributor with a focus on the entertainment industry in Connecticut. My poems have appeared in literary journals such as First Edition, Alimentum and The Recorder. After having a piece of short prose accepted by Bewildering Stories Magazine, I was invited to join the editorial staff.

In addition to my writing career, I have a career in the performing arts. I have starred in several independent art and horror films shot in CT and NY. In the 1990s I competed in various talent pageants in New England. You can reached at M_J_Neary@hotmail.com. I love networking with fellow writers and actors.

Reviews from Susan Haley

“Wynfield’s Kingdom”

By:

Marina Julia Neary

Can a lover of suspense, or gang warfare, tales of the supernatural or even horror literally be captured by historical fiction? Especially a first-effort novel set in the slums of London at the beginning of the nineteenth century? Can those rather put off by the Literary Classics due to the lack of super-techno graphics, be gripped by unfamiliar dialect, stage-play humor, magic, multiple identities, hellish laboratories and Victor Hugo philosophy? Naysayers, do prepare to be taken aback! No pun intended. Never underestimate the power behind the heavy curtains of an era.

Marina Julia Neary’s epic, Wynfield’s Kingdom about an exiled physician, Thomas Grant, and a young genius orphan, Wynfield, did capture me from the beginning chapter. A reviewer of many books, I’ve not been really gripped in quite the same way any time recently.

The opening introduction of Dr. Thomas Grant illustrates the distinct lines between the English royalty and the ‘commoners’ that rivals any culture divides we may endure in the world today. From that realization, the reader is thrust into Bermondsey, Southwark on the southern shores of the River Thames, the slums of London. Here we witness a brutal beating, a kidnapping ring, human guinea pig science experiments and an elegant school for the arts, St. Gabriel’s, a purported Eden in the midst of squalor. We emerge from this series of captivating scenes with, Diana, an infant girl teetering on the edge of life.

Neary’s saga proceeds for the next 400 pages through a remarkably woven drama embracing every nuance of human nature regardless the times or place. Wyn, Tom and Diana are, arguably, the most fascinating characters I’ve met in many a novel. Both those fond of history and those bored by it will be so engrossed in their story, our own extremist, technology-driven world will take on a degree of dull.

Wynfield’s Kingdom takes the reader back to a time when human behavior and class-culture, mores and distinctions, disease and myths were met head on with no more than human ingenuity, determination, imagination and often desperation and trickery. Lack of wires, microchips, fibers, special effects, apps and Blackberries required the living of an entire lifetime in pursuit.

Neary’s story has an unlimited audience because, though, times, cultures and locale may change, human nature does not. Wynfield’s Kingdom is a Five Star work. I will read it again in a few months just for the experience of being engrossed.

Susan Haley, Author/Editor

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