Fiction
Hospitality
A novel in five stories, spanning the 1100s to the 1900s, with a 2023 museum epilogue.
About the Book
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.
STORY COMPLETE · PUBLICATION MARCH 1, 2027
Ask about this bookA Taste of the Writing
Opening Preview — The First Ground
The First Ground · The 1100s. An imagined beginning beside the Reie, before the hospital has a door, a bed, or a kitchen fire. An opening preview from Hospitality, a novel in five stories.
The first spadeful came up black and wet.
He turned it beside the cord and pressed his boot against the blade again. Water gathered in the hollow almost at once. He watched it for a moment, then looked toward the man holding the other end of the line.
“We shall have to go deeper.”
The man nodded without enthusiasm. Beyond him, the water moved along the bank, carrying a broken reed past the place where they had set their tools. A cart waited on the track. Its driver had wrapped both hands around his elbows against the morning cold.
There was no door yet. No bed, no kitchen fire, no dry place to put a pair of ruined shoes. There were stakes, a cord, and a piece of ground that seemed determined to remain part of the water.
He had built walls before. A wall was work he understood: a straight course, a sound footing, the weight of what would come above. The people who had brought him here spoke of shelter. He could give them foundations, if they would allow him the depth.
A woman approached with a jug and two cups. She waited while he wiped his hand on his tunic, then passed him one. The drink was warm enough that he held it before he drank.
“How many will there be?” he asked.
“To begin with?”
“To come here.”
She looked at the line of stakes. “I do not know.”
He drank, handed back the cup, and moved the cord a little farther from the crumbling edge. Then he set his boot upon the spade again.
Meet the Author
John K. Milius
John K. Milius brings four decades of sales, leadership, customer relationships, and hard-earned commercial judgment to the page. His fiction turns that same eye toward Brugge—a city of water, memory, history, and stories waiting beneath the stones.
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