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The Habits of Free Men: Europe fell. Someone kept a light on.
Paperback
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ISBN13: 9798186248750
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 8 2026
Pages: 418
Weight: 1.11
Height: 1.04 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 8 2026
Pages: 418
Weight: 1.11
Height: 1.04 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Brussels, 2040. The European Union has been dead for nine years, its members swallowed one by one into fascist regimes. Only two democracies are still standing on the continent - and a German election, nine days out, will decide whether either survives.
Elis Severová is one of the last journalists working for the last real newspaper in Belgium. Nine years ago, her father, a philosophy professor, was hanged in Prague for writing a book about the habits that keep men free. She has kept the manuscript in a shoebox ever since. She has never been able to finish reading it.
Elis Severová is one of the last journalists working for the last real newspaper in Belgium. Nine years ago, her father, a philosophy professor, was hanged in Prague for writing a book about the habits that keep men free. She has kept the manuscript in a shoebox ever since. She has never been able to finish reading it.
Then an old widow is found dead alone in her Brussels apartment, and the chess bulletins she left behind turn out to be a code. Follow it far enough and it leads somewhere no one is supposed to look: Concordia Trust, a cultural fund quietly sitting on the picked-clean bones of Europe's old treasury, over a trillion euros, some of it flowing straight into the hands of the men rebuilding the continent's cages.
Chasing the money means trusting a Luxembourg banker who has been stealing from the thieves for years and has run out of reasons to be careful - and falling for him anyway. It means a newsroom that could be seized any morning, a photographer who won't stop shooting even when it costs her everything, and a translator carrying a debt he has never confessed. It means becoming the story instead of writing it, and slowly realizing that the informer standing closest to the truth may be standing closest to her heart.
With nine days left before the vote that will decide Europe's fate, Elis has one chance to get the proof into print before the men who own the money finish buying the headlines too. What she is carrying could end a regime. It could also finish what a Prague courtroom started nine years ago - with the people she loves most.
Written under crumbling streetlamps and closing borders, THE HABITS OF FREE MEN is a slow-burn political thriller: a novel of espionage, inheritance, and quiet betrayal, and a love story between two people who have both already spent everything they had left to lose.
It asks the question every generation has to answer for itself: when the record is being erased in real time, who keeps it - and what does it cost them?
For readers who loved the moral weight of A Small Town in Germany, the investigative slow burn of Lethal White, and the philosophical undertow of Night Train to Lisbon, this is a novel about the last currency that survives every collapse: whether ordinary people keep choosing, in small rooms, with everything against them, to stay free.
Chasing the money means trusting a Luxembourg banker who has been stealing from the thieves for years and has run out of reasons to be careful - and falling for him anyway. It means a newsroom that could be seized any morning, a photographer who won't stop shooting even when it costs her everything, and a translator carrying a debt he has never confessed. It means becoming the story instead of writing it, and slowly realizing that the informer standing closest to the truth may be standing closest to her heart.
With nine days left before the vote that will decide Europe's fate, Elis has one chance to get the proof into print before the men who own the money finish buying the headlines too. What she is carrying could end a regime. It could also finish what a Prague courtroom started nine years ago - with the people she loves most.
Written under crumbling streetlamps and closing borders, THE HABITS OF FREE MEN is a slow-burn political thriller: a novel of espionage, inheritance, and quiet betrayal, and a love story between two people who have both already spent everything they had left to lose.
It asks the question every generation has to answer for itself: when the record is being erased in real time, who keeps it - and what does it cost them?
For readers who loved the moral weight of A Small Town in Germany, the investigative slow burn of Lethal White, and the philosophical undertow of Night Train to Lisbon, this is a novel about the last currency that survives every collapse: whether ordinary people keep choosing, in small rooms, with everything against them, to stay free.
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