You will feel, in your ribs, the difference between an object that was let go and one that was torn away — and understand that a chain of individually reasonable, fully-documented institutional steps can still arrive at cruelty nobody chose.
The Provenance Novels · Cover revealed
The Lighthouse Auctioneer
He catalogues what the sea gives back. One boot was never truly given at all.
Every object at Harrow & Tidel comes with proof of who let it go. Lot 441 comes with a mother who never did.
The story
What waits inside
In a converted lighthouse outside Oostende, Harrow & Tidel auctions the things people abandon during disasters: a salt-stiffened coat, a wedding ring left in a lifeboat, a suitcase too heavy to carry. Each lot arrives with a documented release.
Jonas Meijer writes those histories for the catalogue. He also hears what the paperwork cannot hold: the instant an object left someone's hand.
Then he opens Lot 441, a child's red boot recovered after the sinking of the MV Kestrel. Its provenance is legally complete. Online bidding is already climbing. But the child's mother is still searching for it, and the release Jonas hears does not match the story attached to the lot.
With the auction approaching, Jonas traces the boot backward through a beach volunteer, a ferry survivor, an insurer, and signatures designed to make abandonment look final. Every account is plausible. None is whole. The auction house insists that withdrawing it would threaten every lot it has ever sold.
If the hammer falls, the boot will disappear into a private collection and one family's last unanswered question will become someone else's property. To stop it, Jonas must prove that a catalogue can be accurate in every detail and still tell a devastating lie.
A salt-dark literary thriller about grief, provenance, and the moral cost of turning what was lost into something that can be owned.
Harrow & Tidel, an auction house built into a decommissioned lighthouse outside Oostende, sells only objects that disaster survivors left behind — never stolen, only abandoned when carrying them cost more than keeping them — and every lot ships with a documented provenance story of who released it, when, and under what pressure
A chain of individually reasonable, thoroughly documented institutional steps can add up to a cruelty no single person in the chain chose or intended — and the fix is not finding a villain to blame but building a mandatory pause into the system itself
Interior previews
First pages arriving soon
When manuscript pages are ready, they will appear here as a lightweight gallery — designed for fast loading, sharp type, and quiet immersion.