A Thorny Path — Volume 01
In ancient Alexandria, a city of philosophers and fading gods, a gem-cutter named Heron has not touched clay since the day his wife died. Now his children carry forward the family's artistic blood: Alexander, a young painter who falls fatally in love with a woman named Korinna, only to lose her to death before he can speak his heart. As he paints her portrait, he grapples with a terrible question: can art capture what is already gone? Meanwhile, their brother Philip descends into obsession with spiritualism, desperate to believe he can reach beyond the veil. The novel unfolds against a city teetering between pagan antiquity and a new era, where beauty and mortality dance in every street. Ebers writes with the tender weight of someone who understands that grief is an inheritance, and that the ones we lose never truly leave the rooms where we made them. This is a book about what art preserves and what it cannot save.
