House of Five

Abstract

This thesis presents the opening chapters of my novel, House of Five. Set in Fig Town, a fictional port on the Aegean Sea, the four chapters move between an empire’s final years in the 1910s and the era of its modern republic. Irene arrives at the Lyre House, which is perched above the harbor, blaming herself for her mother’s death and certain she doesn’t belong. Half orphanage, half choir school, the Lyre House is unlike any other place to grow up. Though reluctant at first, Irene finds purpose there in singing alongside girls drawn from across the fading empire—Aysel, Francesca, Nara, and Rivka—under exacting foreign instructors. She has always sensed the untamed power in her voice, and the Lyre House shows her what it can do when interwoven with theirs. As the empire fractures and the patrons come to prize solos and favors, the girls are tempted into rivalry, threatening the fragile chorus. Over a century later, the Lyre House stands in ruins. Developers circle the crumbling building, one intent on demolition, the other attuned to what lives on in the walls. Narrated by Irene’s lingering spirit, now fused with the house itself, House of Five is a novel about plural belonging in fractured time and the architecture of memory: how a building preserves what people forget.