The Kindest Man in Ghent

He gave them a house, a car, a life. He never once mentioned it. That's the problem. Bram Callebaut spends his days telling strangers what their inheritance is worth. He is one of four people in Belgium whose valuation cannot be improved by asking somebody else. He can price a cabinet in four seconds, a silver service in a glance, a dead man's library before the widow has finished her coffee. He cannot put a price on his own life - because his father-in-law bought it for him. The house. The wedding. The children's school. His mother's flat by the sea. Dirk Verstraete paid for all of it, over nineteen years, and never mentioned a single euro. He is, by universal agreement, the kindest man in Ghent. And his kindness has quietly turned his son-in-law into a man who eats three helpings of a rabbit he despises every Sunday, because it is the only payment he has left to make. When Bram discovers that even his job was secretly rescued by the old man's money, he does the one thing a valuer can do to earn his freedom back: he decides to be wrong on purpose. What follows is small, squalid, brilliantly executed - and entirely successful. But a debt that is never called cannot be repaid. And a gift, it turns out, cannot be given back. The Kindest Man in Ghent is a razor-dry comedy of gratitude, money, and the unbearable weight of being loved without limit - a novel about the one debt no fortune can settle, and the quiet catastrophe of a good man who will not stop being good.