Principal, Praya
Vivienne Ho
She takes the chair with its back to the window: the worst seat for the light and the best one for everything else. Nobody argues.
The premise
The most composed woman in any boardroom in Hong Kong does not exist.
Vivienne Ho is a socialite and a financier, principal of a firm that buys businesses other people would strip and keeps them alive. She has spent five years building this life so completely it became real to her. She has always known it must eventually break.
Damien Tang, a self-made financier, wants to marry her. His family’s due diligence and a very old institution’s reawakened interest arrive in the same season, aimed at the same woman.
What follows is a hunt, a courtship and the audit of a life, in a season where being known is more dangerous than being found.
Protagonists
Two people, one season
The public record only. The rest of the cast keeps to the book, and to your archive, exactly as far as you have read.
Tang Group
Damien Tang
He has never in his life had to be ready to leave a room quickly. He loses the deal, and the loss is what makes him look properly.
Read a sample
“In a tower on Des Voeux Road, thirty-eight floors above the Hong Kong traffic, Vivienne had come to buy a container terminal from a family that had not yet admitted it was selling.”
The sample is Chapter One. The rest of the novel is in the complete editions.
Formats
The book is complete without us
EPUB
For your e-reader
The complete narrative, no account or browser required. The website can enrich it; it is never required reading.
Coming soon
PDF
For print and tablets
Identical text, chapter order and typography, verified against the canonical manuscript.
Coming soon
Online sample
Read the opening
Chapter One only, in the web reader, with adjustable typography. The complete novel is the EPUB or the PDF, not this page.
Open the readerContent guidance
Before you begin
Pantheon is an adult espionage novel. It contains violence in an espionage register, grief and bereavement, institutional coercion, and deception inside intimate relationships. Complete guidance, including chapter-level notes, ships with every edition of the book.
Already reading? Your archive is spoiler-safe by construction: it shows what you have read and nothing you haven’t, not even as a silhouette.
Colophon
How this book is made
The story and the initial prose start with me. The premise, the cast, the plot and the sixty-three chapter route were written down before any drafting, and so were the lines the scenes turn on.
The drafting is AI-assisted. A model then extends that material into longer chapter prose. It is never given a blank page.
Every chapter is then edited by me, and revised until it holds. Nothing here ships as a model wrote it.
The artwork is AI-generated. The cover and the character portraits were made with ChatGPT image generation, from the character descriptions I had already written.