Inheritance: A Novel

by Adam Thirlwell

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.

Kindle Edition

Expected publication July 13, 2027

About the author

Adam Thirlwell was born in 1978 and grew up in North London. He is a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford and assistant editor of Areté magazine.

His first novel, 'Politics', a love story with digressions, was published in 2003, and his second book, 'Miss Herbert: A Book of Novels, Romances & Their Unknown Translators, Containing Ten Languages, Set on Four Continents & Accompanied by Maps, Portraits, Squiggles, Illustrations, & a Variety of Helpful Indexes', in 2007. 'Miss Herbert' won a 2008 Somerset Maugham Award. His third novel is 'The Escape' (2009).

In 2003, Adam Thirlwell was named by Granta magazine as one of twenty 'Best of Young British novelists'. He lives in Oxford.