In her Cambridge laboratory, mice inherit their grandparents' fears through mechanisms that should be impossible. The research is controversial, the implications unsettling, and Anna Osborne has spent her career maintaining scientific distance from the questions that haunt her own family.
Then her mother dies, leaving behind a farmhouse in Nebraska, a confession that upends everything Anna thought she knew, and evidence that the secrets she has been running from are written in her own DNA.
The Vance Farm holds answers that Claire spent sixty years burying. A murder disguised as an accident. A pregnancy that arrived at precisely the wrong moment. A family system built on silence so complete that even the women who lived through it could not speak of what they knew. Now Anna must excavate the truth from land records and DNA profiles, from her grandmother Helen's calculated denials and her great-uncle Thomas's deathbed words, from the methylation patterns in her own cells that carry memories she never made.
The Inheritance is a literary mystery about what we owe to the dead, what the body remembers that the mind forgets, and the price of breaking silences that were meant to last forever.
Source Materials:
William Shakespeare's Hamlet (c. 1600): The ghost who demands justice, the son paralyzed between knowledge and action, the family poisoned by secrets kept too long. Anna inherits her father's unfinished work just as Hamlet inherits his father's unfinished vengeance.
Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts (1881): The drama of inherited sin, generational silence, and the terrible cost of respectability. Mrs. Alving's discovery that her son has inherited his father's disease becomes Anna's discovery that trauma leaves molecular traces. The Norwegian parlor becomes a Nebraska farmhouse, but the question remains the same: what do we owe to truths that were buried to protect us?
Eugene O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms (1924): The American family farm as contested inheritance, the dead mother whose presence haunts the living, the transgressive desires that destroy what they touch. O'Neill's New England stone walls become Nebraska windbreaks, but the land still holds what was done upon it.
About Fractional Fiction:
This novel belongs to the Fractional Fiction series, which fuses public domain dramatic literature with contemporary scientific research to create new literary works. Each book takes classic plays or stories, identifies their enduring human questions, and rebuilds them through the lens of modern knowledge. The dramatic architecture remains; the world transforms.
The Inheritance braids three canonical tragedies of inherited guilt with the emerging science of transgenerational epigenetics: the study of how experience alters gene expression across generations without changing DNA sequence. The source texts all answer "no" to the question of whether we can escape what our parents made us. The science answers "maybe." That uncertainty is where the novel lives.
