Heirs of the Old WorldA novel by Grant Corbett
ST. PETERSBURG  ·  1866

A city built
on something older.

St. Petersburg, 1866. For four years, Vadim has been tracing buried structures that appear on no official plan. Clara has been helping him investigate for months, bringing a familiarity with the Winter Palace and its hidden passages that he lacks.

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Historical mystery✦Dark speculative fiction
Heirs of the Old World cover: golden architectural cutaway above underground machinery on a dark green field
I. THE STORY

A past in fragments

Much of the past survives in buildings that have been altered, repaired and put to new uses. What remains is rarely complete, and even the oldest structures offer few clues to their original purpose.

As Vadim and Clara investigate, they find that physical evidence and surviving records do not always agree. Some discoveries raise questions that neither can answer, while others suggest that parts of this history have been deliberately concealed.

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II. THE PREVIEW

Two ways to see the hidden.

Choose a perspective and step into the story.

Clara’s separate point-of-view preview will be added when it is ready.

III. THE WORLD

A familiar century.
An unfamiliar past.

It is 1866, and people have adapted to conditions they do not fully understand. Charged weather, inherited precautions and older structures are part of ordinary life.

St. Petersburg, 1866. Palaces, servants’ passages, winter streets, workshops and official registers form the visible city. Its geography, however, is not as complete as its maps suggest.
Certain nights bring a strange charge. Walking sticks, metal dress frames and old practical habits offer limited protection. People know what to do long before they know why it works.
Under later masonry lie older passages, unusual proportions and machinery that no contemporary engineer designed. Some structures survive because people have kept repairing what they never fully understood.
Cover of Heirs of the Old World by Grant Corbett
IV. THE BOOK

Heirs of
the Old World

Publication in preparation

Heirs of the Old World is a historical dark mystery by Grant Corbett, set against an altered nineteenth century.

Kindle edition plannedPaperback planned
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