Where Experience Becomes
Imagination and Story.

The Customer in Front of You

Nine practical lessons begin at a neighborhood deli counter and travel into four decades of sales, leadership, and customer relationships. Warm, candid, and commercially grounded, the book shows why everything else can wait when a customer is standing in front of you.

The Counter Never Lies

Every organization has a counter—the place where its promises finally meet reality. Through Rosana’s deli and the people gathered around it, twelve hard-won lessons reveal what leadership, sales, trust, and human behavior look like when the ticket is yours.

The Catch and the Pitch

At Grandstand Manufacturing, Marketing sees the field and Sales must deliver the pitch. Mara and Jack learn that neither function wins alone: Marketing makes Sales look good, Sales makes Marketing believable, and the customer controls the scoreboard.

The Last Light on the Dijver

Historical fiction set in Brugge, 1878–1913.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Brugge begins to wake after centuries of slumber. As old waterways, buried histories, and new ambitions converge, two strangers are drawn into the life of a city deciding what it will become.

The Secret at Minnewater

Brugge, 1444. Ten pieces of red cloth leave Mahieu Huyt’s dye yard. Twelve appear in the accounts. When young clerk Emmerik Saye is found dead at Minnewater, a dispute over cloth and money draws Mahieu’s son Severin into suspicion. Dismas Loete and his daughter Alix follow the small, stubborn discrepancies left behind: a mark on a board, a questionable debt, a key whose presence tells the wrong story. As the inquiry reaches from a working family’s yard into a wealthy merchant’s household, secrets threaten livelihoods, marriages, and loyalties. In a city built on trade, someone has made a young man’s silence worth more than his life. The Secret at Minnewater is a historical murder mystery of family, ambition, and the price of an honest account.

The Quiet of the Thread

During the First World War, a woman in occupied Brugge learns things she was never meant to know while working close to German uniforms and whispered conversations. A single thread can carry the weight of a garment—and a quiet exchange can carry the fate of cities, armies, and nations.

The Reckoning of Saint Donatian

Brugge, 1127. Young clerk Wulfram is building a life around copying work, his growing love for Heilwig, and the exacting guidance of Galbert. Then Charles the Good, Count of Flanders, is murdered at prayer in Saint Donatian’s, and Wulfram’s glimpse of drawn swords becomes something powerful men want turned into names. As siege, fire, and vengeance tear through the city, Heilwig’s household faces dangers rooted in kinship, wealth, and the uncertain boundary between service and freedom. Through the struggle for Flanders in 1127–28, the two must find room for love and ordinary work in a city demanding loyalties neither can safely promise. Drawing on Galbert’s chronicle, The Reckoning of Saint Donatian is a novel of marriage, survival, and the cost of bearing witness—when telling only what you know may be the most dangerous choice of all.

Hospitality

A novel in five stories, spanning the 1100s to the 1900s, with a 2023 museum epilogue.

Five lives. Five turning points. One place of welcome. In the 1100s, a builder sinks his spade into waterlogged ground beside the Reie, asked to raise shelter before winter. Two centuries later, a carpenter works above the sick beneath the hospital’s great timber roof. In the 1500s, a sister must weigh the needs of those at the door against the people already in her care. In the 1700s, an apothecary sister faces the limits of what her remedies can offer. In the 1900s, a nurse tends patients as the old hospital approaches the end of its working life. Across five connected stories, Hospitality follows the people who build, sustain, and sometimes struggle with the promise of Sint-Janshospitaal, Brugge. A final return at the museum’s 2023 reopening brings their world into ours: a visitor studies a painting of the wards, looks up, and recognizes the room around him. A novel in five stories about the work, sacrifice, and human warmth behind an open door.

DRAAK

Before there was a dragon, there was copper. Mined, traded, hammered, gilded, and raised above a medieval city, it becomes the center of a centuries-old argument between Brugge and Gent—part history, part legend, and a story transformed with every telling. People remember stories. Metal remembers blows.

The Lion and the Bear

Brugge, 1914. Widower Cyriel Vandenbussche reopens an old pub and restores the lion-and-bear sign first hung above its door in 1776. Then a stranger in buckled shoes takes the window seat. His name is Isidoor Lambrecht. He painted the sign—and he has come back to ask what became of the daughter he left in this house in 1780. As German occupation closes around the city, Cyriel follows a trail of old accounts, withheld letters, and a promise his own family would rather forget. Around him, the pub’s stubborn regulars quarrel, gossip, fall short, and look after one another, while lodging-house keeper Sidonie Vercruysse begins to make room for love in a life already crowded with responsibility. Warm, romantic, and quietly unsettling, The Lion and the Bear is a story of a father’s search, a woman’s right to her own future, and the courage it takes to answer for the past.

The Golden Spurs

Flanders, 1302. Brugge is wealthy, restless, and living beneath the authority of the French crown. When revolt turns working men into soldiers, a fictional Brugge craftsman leaves his family and guild behind to join a militia marching toward Kortrijk. There, ordinary infantrymen must hold their ground against the armored cavalry of one of Europe’s most powerful kingdoms. Seen from inside the Flemish line, The Golden Spurs follows one man through occupation, uprising, fear, mud, and the brutal confusion of battle—and then home again, carrying a victory that has changed both history and himself. The gilded spurs taken from fallen knights become trophies, but the novel asks what triumph costs the common people who survive it.

Behind the White Walls

Brugge, 1668. Widowed and left with debts she cannot explain, Sabina Vervenne enters a charitable almshouse with a chest of clothes, one silver spoon, and little patience for being told to be grateful. Behind its whitewashed walls, she finds women as stubborn, funny, and wounded as herself—and rooms whose privacy is worth defending. When the trustees propose putting two women to a room, Sabina must learn to speak alongside her neighbors, rather than for them. Meanwhile, her sharp exchanges with benefactor Rombout Ransbeke draw her toward a man who knows more about her late husband’s affairs than she expected. Across ten years of friendship, grief, war, and an unexpected love, Behind the White Walls asks what shelter should cost—and whether accepting care must mean surrendering a life of one’s own.

Thirteen Tolls

In the uneasy years after the Great War, American writer and photographer Jon Marston arrives in Brugge and hears a bell strike once more than it should. Across four terrifying nights, he and Griet Van Acker follow reflections, waterways, and restless history toward a debt the city never settled.

The Bobbins of Saint Anna

In the quiet Saint Anna quarter of nineteenth-century Brugge, gifted young lacemaker Romanie Delbeke grows up to the ceaseless click of wooden bobbins in a family whose survival has depended on lace for generations. When an unexpected commission from one of the city’s old houses draws her into a world of wealth, secrets, and forbidden love, the obligations holding her family together begin to unravel. As a stolen pattern threatens everything she values, Romanie must choose between the craft she inherited, the people who depend on her, and the future she has only begun to imagine. Set against a changing Brugge and the fading dominance of handmade lace, The Bobbins of Saint Anna is a story of love, livelihood, dignity, and the quiet things passed from one generation to the next.

SLIB

Before Brugge became a city of canals, stone, towers, and bells, there was water. As the sea withdraws and leaves behind slib—the fine sediment carried by water—generations of families build homes, raise children, trade, struggle, love, and bury their dead upon land their ancestors could not have occupied.

The Later Light

A contemporary novel about discovering Brugge and choosing a second act.

David Specter has spent his working life helping other people move. Then a visit to Brugge gives him a reason to reconsider where—and how—he wants to live. Beneath the Belfort, along the Dijver, and through the gardens and quiet streets beyond the great squares, a first visit becomes a lasting attachment. Across years of return journeys, friendship, family, and a growing love for Brugge, the city opens a place for writing and a future he is no longer willing to leave indefinitely for later. But making room for that future means real decisions about work, income, and the people who count on him. Warm, observant, and threaded with humor, The Later Light brings the grandeur of Brugge into a story of purposeful change—and the pleasure of finding somewhere worth returning to.

Bonifacius

Brugge, 1784. The cemetery beside the Church of Our Lady closes, leaving a warning: a name must never be separated from the person beneath its stone. More than a century later, an old grave marker finds its way into the masonry of a beautiful new bridge. Then a solitary figure begins appearing after dark. In this atmospheric historical ghost story, the living discover that the dead are not searching for their bodies—they are searching for the names the city has forgotten.