Burden Awakens

Some inherit wealth. Some inherit power. Some inherit the past.

For one hidden web of bloodlines, that last gift is real. When they die, they do not leave a record behind. They leave a life: every memory, every learned skill, every grief and conviction, passed whole into the next of their line and relived from the inside. For thousands of years the handover has never once failed.

Then the last Keeper dies, the inheritance breaks for the first time in history, and on the same night five strangers across the world wake to memories that are not their own.

They are not the only ones who want it. Older powers have spent centuries certain they alone know what such a gift is for: to rule, to heal, to keep asking, to refuse, or to cut it away forever. In this story, the most dangerous people are not the wicked. They are the convinced.

Drawn together beneath a city far older than its streets, the five begin to suspect they are not the true inheritors of this power. They are pieces of something older still-and the past they have woken into has been waiting a very long time to be remembered.

When people inherit the past, do they become wiser, or simply more dangerous?

The Burden Awakens is Book One of The Inheritance Chronicles: a sweeping work of literary fantasy about inherited memory, ancestral grief, and the danger of certainty. For readers of Susanna Clarke's Piranesi, R. F. Kuang's Babel, and V. E. Schwab's The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.

The most dangerous truths are the ones we inherit without question.