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Historical Fiction
Library of Alexandria
By L.J. LUMIERE
A retired professor. A chest hidden in her grandmother’s attic. And a secret that has waited seventeen centuries to be found.
Available as a digital edition through Gumroad.
About the book
When Claire Bennett finally clears out her late grandmother’s attic, she finds a locked chest that has sat untouched for ninety years — and inside it, a discovery that reaches back to the last days of the great library of Alexandria.
Told across two timelines, one in the present day and one in the fourth century, this is a story about what people choose to save, what they choose to risk, and what it costs to be trusted with something that was never meant to belong to one person alone.
As Claire begins to understand what her great-uncle really found on a 1932 excavation, a collector with his own reasons for wanting the discovery kept quiet makes it clear that some inheritances come with a price.
Themes
- Family secrets
- Dual timeline
- History and legacy
- Quiet, later-in-life romance
Preview
Read the first pages
Continue ReadingClaire Bennett had promised herself she would clear out her grandmother’s attic in a single weekend, and she had been wrong about that promise by nearly a month.
It wasn’t the size of the house that had slowed her down — a modest brick colonial on a quiet street in Alexandria, Virginia, three blocks from the river, the kind of house that had belonged to the same family for four generations without anyone quite deciding to modernize it. It was the sheer, accumulated weight of what a life leaves behind. Eleanor Voss had been ninety-one when she died, and ninety-one years of letters, photographs, church programs, and carefully pressed flowers did not sort themselves into donate and keep piles on any reasonable schedule.
Claire had retired from teaching classics at the community college eight months earlier, a decision she still hadn’t entirely made peace with, and told herself that clearing her grandmother’s house was simply the next responsible thing on a list that no longer had a syllabus at the end of it. She did not examine, too closely, the possibility that she had been in less of a hurry to finish than she claimed.