Blackwood Street

Some debts don't stay with the man who incurred them.

Every empire starts the same way: a man decides, once and quietly, that he will never again be powerless. What he becomes afterward is simply the answer to that decision, compounding across a lifetime, the way interest compounds on a debt a person never stops repaying to himself.

That debt doesn't stay his alone for long. It settles into the house he builds, and passes to his children the way a name is passed down: unasked for, and rarely refused. When the son who inherits it finally sits down with everything his father left him, he discovers that some of what's owed was never written into any ledger at all.

This is a novel about what a family agrees not to say to itself, and what happens when one member of it finally decides to ask.