Secrets are a family tradition. They are also the stuff of great short stories. We live in a time when we can trace our ancestry through a saliva sample, FaceTime with relatives on the other side of the globe, and create new families of our own making in ways that were once unthinkable. And yet, unspoken desires and dangerous revelations can still threaten our shared lives. With this in mind, we invited five fiction masters to explore the tangled relations that arise from family secrets. They responded with emotionally resonant stories that consider the realities of inheritance and the consequences of hidden histories.
Alice Hoffman, the New York Times bestselling author of The World That We Knew, brings us a haunting story of loyalty, betrayal, and a young woman’s coming-of-age in early 1900s Massachusetts in Everything My Mother Taught Me.
In Can You Feel This? Julie Orringer, author of The Flight Portfolio, takes us into the chaos of a maternity ward, where an anxious mother-to-be grapples with memories of tragedy as she balances her child’s needs with her own healing.
The author of The Lion’s Den, Anthony Marra, imagines what happens when a son exposes his father’s transgressions in a tell-all and then slinks back home to see him face-to-face.
Jennifer Haigh’s The Zenith Man explores the chilling speculation surrounding a local couple in a captivating story that could only have come from the writer behind such bestselling book as Heat and Light.
And finally, in The Weddings, Alexander Chee, author of The Queen of the Night, portrays a fortysomething gay man who is confronted with his secret past when he receives a wedding invitation from an old college friend.
Inheritance is available for purchase as either a Kindle eBook or an Audible audiobook, and free to download for all Amazon Prime members.