Paternity

Genre: Historical / Literary Fiction – 96,000 words

Pitch: Paternity is a historically grounded, character-driven novel in which questions of fatherhood and truth unfold against the gathering storm of early twentieth-century Europe.

Synopsis: 

Corfu, 1891. In the seclusion of the Achilleion Palace, Empress Elisabeth of Austria, Sissi, confides a forbidden truth: she is pregnant. To protect the throne and avoid scandal, the child must vanish. With the help of her loyal lady-in-waiting Irma Staray, the newborn boy is secretly entrusted to Count and Countess Harrington, an English noble couple who agree to raise him as their own. His true parentage is buried with the discretion of empire.

The boy, Achilles Harrington, grows up in England surrounded by privilege and affection but shadowed by an unnamed absence. A gifted mind and sensitive soul, he becomes a scholar and man of theatre, fascinated by identity, truth, and illusion, without realizing that his own life embodies them all.

When the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo ignites the Great War, whispers about a lost heir born in Corfu resurface among the great powers. Intelligence circles in London and elsewhere quietly exploit the rumor, each hoping to manipulate its symbolic value for diplomatic leverage. Achilles, unknowingly entangled in this web, finds fragments pointing toward himself. The suggestion that he might be linked by blood to the fallen empress disturbs him deeply. What began as a myth becomes a political tool and an existential wound.

After the war, in 1926, seeking peace, Achilles returns to Corfu, the island of his birth. There he devotes himself to the theatre, where illusion feels more honest than politics. He falls in love with Anthē, a luminous and independent woman. Their affair burns intensely and ends painfully, leaving him scared yet wiser.

In the 1940s, as Europe collapses once again, a letter arrives written earlier by Irma Staray and delayed by war. It confirms enough to be convincing but not enough to be certain: the story might be true. Achilles’s long-dormant suspicions erupt into anguish and clarity at once. Whether son of an empress or of rumor itself, he must now live with both possibilities.

In 1956, in his old age, the irony is that he learns of Lakis, a young musician who may be his son. Through the boy’s warmth and innocence, Achilles finally resolves the struggle that haunted him: he accepts that identity is not bestowed by lineage or power, but by love and recognition freely given.

His last words, written like a confession and benediction:

“The origin of man is not the blood, but the gaze of the one who accepts him.”

Sweeping from the courts of Europe to the sunlit verandas of Corfu, Paternity is a powerful exploration of secrecy, history, and selfhood, a novel of emotional depth and political resonance where truth itself remains both the prize and the illusion.