Inheritance - by Adam Thirlwell (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

From Adam Thirlwell, two-time winner of the Granta Award for Best British Novelists, comes a deeply personal and illuminating novel about a writer, his mysterious illness, and the family secrets that upend his understanding of his parents and of his own role as a father.

Adam is a writer and father whose life is upended by a mysterious, permanent migraine and by the resurfacing of a family betrayal that shattered his parents' marriage. As Adam struggles to understand his illness, his father's infidelity, his mother's suffering, and what to tell his own daughter, the novel is an emotionally devastating and surprisingly humorous story of secrecy, survival, and inherited trauma--both physical and emotional.

Review Quotes

"Adam Thirlwell has written the story of his suffering body. He has also written the story of his suffering family. And he has seen that both are in fact the same, which he tells in an audacious and searing book." --Emmanuel Carrère, author of The Adversary

"INHERITANCE shows this brilliant writer transformed. This is autofiction at once exhilaratingly honest and tender: a story of illness, death and family - and proof that pain can be turned into radiant fiction." --Daniel Kehlmann, author of Measuring the World

About the Author

Adam Thirlwell is the author of four novels, and his work has been translated into thirty languages. His essays appear in The New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, and he is an advisory editor of The Paris Review. His awards include a Somerset Maugham Award and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 2018, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has twice been selected by Granta as one of their Best of Young British Novelists.