🖋️ The Other Hand
Age: 18+91 pagesA historical novel for adults in chapters — confessions of a Venetian scribe — idea & editing by Dheiab Alawfi, written with AI assistance
Venice, carnival 1587. Matteo Lanza is a scribe who can write in anyone's hand, and he has been sentenced to death, with seven days left under a roof of lead. Day by day he writes his confessions: of a countess in the mask of silence who wants a letter from her dead husband, of a councillor of the Ten who buys every ledger in the city, of an orphan boy who learns his hand at night, and of a sister sold twenty-three years ago who left him a little boat drawn on a door. Everything in his pages is true… except one sheet. Eight chapters of deceit, cunning and betrayal. (For adults: poisoning, execution and violence)
Read the story now →Read it or listen aloud, with questions and stars.
How it begins: To Whoever Finds These Pages
I write to you, stranger whose name and face I do not know, from a cell under a roof of lead, on the highest floor of the Doge's Palace, the place the Venetians call "the Piombi" and speak of in lowered voices, as people lower their voices passing a graveyard at night.
The roof above me is sheets of lead that drink in the whole day's sun and pour it back on me at night like fire, so that my sweat runs onto the paper and blots some of what I write, and I write it again. The jailer, after I bribed him with the last coin in my pocket, gave me two candles, a bottle of ink and a bundle of cheap paper, and said as he shut the door: "Write whatever you like, Lanza. Nobody will read it."
He is wrong. Everything my hands have written all my life has been read by everyone, the Doge and the merchant, the lover and the judge, and all of them believed it. This is the first time I have written…
The lesson: Whoever asks you for a lie today will need to be rid of you tomorrow, and the only truth that cannot be forged is what you write in your own hand
Read the story now →
Tales Storyالعربية