ANDREW SHAW

The Novel

The False Eagle

Rome remembers everything. It doesn't always say what.

The False Eagle — front cover: four figures with backpacks seen from behind, facing a narrow wooded gorge with a waterfall in the cleft

What begins as a family trip to Tuscany turns unsettling when Ben and Rachel Linden and their children, Clara and Milo, begin to suspect that the weathered villa they have rented is hiding more than age and silence.

A strange clue beneath the property draws them into a trail of forgotten notes, sealed spaces, old roads, and family secrets woven deep into the hills. But with every answer comes greater risk, and what begins as curiosity soon becomes a search that may alter far more than their holiday.

Atmospheric, intelligent, and steeped in history, The False Eagle is a literary mystery of family, inheritance, and the cost of uncovering what was meant to remain hidden.

“Two thousand years, and it was still waiting for the right hand to come back for it.”

— The False Eagle

Book One of The Linden Inheritance

Hear the Opening

Autumn, 1965

“The shovel hit wood.”

Prologue · Excerpt

The first three minutes, from the audiobook edition.

Read it before it is published

The False Eagle is finished and not published. Before it goes any further I send it to a small number of readers who will tell me the truth about it. Ask below — or just leave an address and I will write when there is news.

No payment and no obligation. One address, used only for news about the books — nothing else, ever. Please be 16 or older.

Somewhere south of Florence, a road remembers where it used to go — and someone always seems to be watching who takes it.

The Linden Inheritance

Five Books, Five Roads

One is bound and on the shelf. The other four are still wrapped — turn a tag to see how far along each road has come.

The False Eagle · Shaw
IIin preparationa city on a cliff, and what the cliff is hollow with
IIIexpecteda stone arena the town never stopped using
IVexpecteda lake with a Roman floor
Vthe last roadevery road, remembering where it began

Book One of The Linden Inheritance · five books, five roads

The Visitors' Book

Leave Your Name

Dispatches when the door opens: publication news, new plates for the atlas, and the road to Book Two. No noise — a letter now and then, the way Enzo would have wanted it.

The undersigned wishes to be written to.

recorded.

The hills keep their own hours.

The Author

Andrew Shaw

Andrew Shaw writes fiction at the border of the present and the deep past. The False Eagle is his debut novel; he is at work on the second. For rights inquiries or press: andrew@andrewdshaw.ca