Twos and Threes

The burden of being born into wealth is that nothing you achieve ever quite belongs to you. Stuart Heron, heir to a diamond merchant dynasty, has everything laid before him - influence, money, opportunity - and he despises every golden offering. When his uncle Baldwin offers to pull strings with Sir Michael Forrest, Stuart snaps: "You've got too much assistance in your power. I want to achieve." This is a novel about the peculiar anguish of privilege, a young man who cannot escape his family's shadow yet cannot bring himself to embrace it. The book unfolds through conversations in libraries and drawing rooms, philosophical debates about literature and values, and the slow revelation of what it costs to refuse an inheritance. Stern, writing in 1916, captures a particular kind of early twentieth-century anguish: the question of whether one can truly create oneself, or whether we are always, in some way, the product of what we were given. For readers who enjoy early Modernist explorations of identity and the novel of ideas.