Inheritance of Silence (PB) (2026)

What if the greatest inheritance a father leaves his son is the one neither of them knows how to name?

Inheritance of Silence is an intimate work of literary autofiction about fathers and sons, masculinity, grief, and the emotional languages passed quietly from one generation to the next.

Growing up in Central Florida, Emmanuel spent his adolescence working alongside his father after school, cleaning offices, libraries, and telephone companies late into the night. While other children went to practices, clubs, and games, he learned another curriculum: endurance, responsibility, work, and silence.

Years later, from the vast quiet of Western Alaska, he begins examining what those nights placed inside him.

His search takes him backward into his father's life from Key West, poverty, fatherlessness, racism, military service, addiction, anger, and physical pain to the complicated ways a wounded man tried to love his son without possessing the language to say so.

But this is not an indictment of a father.

It is an examination of inheritance: what families pass down without intending to, what survival teaches us to mistake for strength, and what happens when one person decides a generational pattern will go no further.

Tender, searching, and unflinching, Inheritance of Silence asks a difficult question:

What should we honor from those who came before us and what must end with us?