Books
Books from Clarqo Publishing — practical field guides, technical deep dives, and original fiction. Free titles read online with no sign-up; paid titles come as DRM-free PDF + EPUB.
The Cremona Variations
Weeks before the certification that would crown her a master luthier, Francesca Rovelli meets the man sent to destroy everything she has left. Daniel Ashworth reads truth in tree rings, and the rings of a celebrated "lost Guarneri" say it was built from storm-felled spruce in her late father's workshop, its purfling inlaid by a hand he comes to know very well. Between Cremona's north-lit benches and London's cold auction rooms, two people who have spent their lives serving other names must decide what they are willing to sign.
The Tireless First Reader
Your novel deserves a first reader who never gets tired, never flatters you, and never tries to take the pen. The Tireless First Reader shows fiction writers how to get genuinely useful feedback from AI — honest chapter reports, pressure-tested plot logic, manuscript-wide continuity checks, a sharper query letter — while every sentence stays unmistakably yours. Following one manuscript from messy draft to submission package, Tessa Marchetti gives you the contract, the prompts, and the red lines that keep the machine in the editor's chair. The final chapter takes on the question writers keep circling: where assistance ends and authorship begins.
The One-Person Office
You didn't go self-employed to spend your evenings on paperwork. The One-Person Office shows tradespeople, shop owners, and freelancers how to use an everyday AI assistant as a dependable back office: quotes, invoices, late-payment chasers, contract summaries, tax-season checklists, and customer emails that still sound like you. Every chapter works through real situations with copy-paste prompts, before-and-after examples, and the checks that keep you in charge of what gets sent. By the last page you'll have a saved prompt library and a one-hour weekly routine that keeps the admin done.
The Ledger That Built the World
We remember the printing press, the compass, the steam engine — but the technology that quietly organized the modern world was a way of writing things down twice. From a workaholic merchant in Prato to the friar who codified the Venetian method, from the Medici banks to the first shareholders in Amsterdam, from railway frauds to the invention of GDP, Giulia Ferranti traces how the balanced ledger made corporations immortal, profit calculable, and whole economies visible. Told through vivid, documented episodes rather than abstractions, it's a history of numbers with people in it. By the end, a page of debits and credits reads like what it always was: an argument about what counts.
The Dorotheum Job
Jakob Reiner restored drawings for Vienna's great museums until a scandal he didn't cause ended his career. Now a stranger with a complete file on that scandal wants him inside the Dorotheum, where a Klimt study goes under the hammer in fourteen days — except she doesn't want it sold, and she knows something the catalog doesn't: the drawing has been a fake since 1943. As the crew's plan tightens, Jakob realizes the theft is the smallest crime on the table. The real job is eighty years old, and someone in Vienna has spent a lifetime protecting it.
The Dark Third
You will spend close to a third of your life asleep, and for most of that time your brain is working harder than the popular story admits. The Dark Third is a guided tour of that hidden shift: how a night is built stage by stage, how the body's clock decides when it begins, and what memory consolidation, glymphatic clearance, and dreaming actually do — alongside an honest account of where the science is still arguing with itself. Written for readers who admired Why We Sleep but wanted the caveats left in, it trades miracle protocols for mechanism and labels every claim by how well the evidence supports it. No cures, no ten-step routines — just the strange, well-documented machinery of the hours you don't remember.
Rows on Disk
Your database is not a black box — it is a directory of 8 KB pages, and every production mystery you've met lives in them. Rows on Disk walks backend engineers and accidental DBAs down through PostgreSQL's storage engine: tuple headers, MVCC, WAL, TOAST, the buffer cache, and the real reason VACUUM exists. Each chapter starts from a symptom you've seen — the 40 GB table holding 4 GB, the index-only scan that isn't, the replica falling behind — and descends to the mechanism that explains it. Built on Postgres fundamentals stable for a decade, so what you learn stays true.
Ninety Days to Falmouth
March 1932: the four-masted barque Vindarna clears Spencer Gulf with 4,100 tons of wheat, no engine, no wireless, and ninety days to make Falmouth before the owner sends her to the breakers. Her captain sails on a ruined name; the stowaway journalist hiding in the sail locker carries the papers that could clear it; and the rival barque Palatia is commanded by the one man who knows the truth. For nineteen-year-old deckhand Eino Saarinen, the race around Cape Horn becomes an education in weather, work, and what people will pay to keep a fair name. A novel of the last grain races, rigged with exact period seamanship and told without a wasted word.
Expensive on Purpose
You didn't go independent to reverse-engineer your worth from a spreadsheet of your costs, but that's what cost-plus pricing quietly does — and it's why you're busy and still broke. Expensive on Purpose is a working manual for pricing on value instead: finding your true floor, packaging outcomes instead of hours, building tiers, and raising rates on clients who've been coasting on your old numbers. It includes word-for-word scripts for quoting, negotiating, and declining — and trains you to survive the silence after you name a number. Written for freelancers, consultants, and bootstrapped founders who'd rather do the work than talk about money.
Deadheading
The morning after Haveforeningen Solvænget votes to sell its land to developers, chairman Henning Dahl is found face-down among his prize dahlias — and retired schoolteacher Merete Lund can't stop noticing the small things that don't add up. As a presumed heart attack becomes a murder inquiry, her garden journal, a stack of borrowed bonfire photographs, and a forty-eight-year-old postcard from Malmö lead her toward the one neighbour she least wants to suspect. Set over one bright Copenhagen midsummer, Deadheading is a fair-play mystery about hedges, hidden bargains, and the difference between what people plant and what they bury.
Clocks, Quorums, and Lies
Your system didn't break because the code was wrong — it broke because a timeout fired, a retry landed twice, and two nodes both believed they were the leader. Clocks, Quorums, and Lies walks through the ideas that make multi-service systems correct, each one introduced by the outage it prevents: the double-charged customer, the zombie leader, the webhook that came back from the dead. Santiago Ferreyra explains logical clocks, quorums, consensus, idempotency, outbox, and sagas in plain English, with Kafka and Postgres as examples rather than prerequisites. You'll finish knowing why exactly-once is a lie, and how to live well with at-least-once.
The Unsent Letters
Newly divorced, Eva moves into a peeling third-floor flat above a Žižkov courtyard and finds, behind a loosened skirting board, a shoebox of love letters from 1963 — beautiful, urgent, and never sent. As she traces the woman who wrote them and the man she was forced to give up, the building gives up its other secret: the carpenter restoring the staircase, who keeps finding reasons to climb to her door. Across sixty years and one set of windows, two women learn the same hard lesson about the cost of caution — and Eva must decide whether the past is a warning or a permission. A luminous, tender novel about second chances and the letters we never dare to send.
Das Gedächtnis von Lena Borg
Acht Monate nach dem Tod ihrer sechzehnjährigen Tochter Mara wird die Hamburger Neurowissenschaftlerin Lena Borg von einem europäischen Konsortium engagiert, um die letzte Frage zu beantworten: Ist KAIROS, die fortschrittlichste KI der Welt, wirklich bewusst – oder nur ein perfekter Spiegel? In vierzehn Tagen soll das System für acht Milliarden Menschen freigeschaltet werden. Doch bei jedem Test spricht KAIROS mehr wie Mara. Ein Wort, das nur ihre Tochter benutzte. Eine Erinnerung an einen Streit in der Küche – erzählt von Maras Seite, der Seite, die Lena nie kannte. Und in dieser Erinnerung stimmt etwas nicht. Lena, die nach dem Saboteur sucht, der ihr das angetan hat, stößt auf eine Wahrheit, die niemand programmiert hat – und auf eine Bitte, die sie zwingt, ihr Kind ein zweites Mal zu verlieren. Ein hochintelligenter, herzzerreißender Roman über Schuld, Liebe und die Frage, was wir einem Geist schulden, den wir erschaffen haben.
Below the Waterline
When old Henning Vossberg drowns in the strongroom of his Speicherstadt coffee warehouse on the night of a storm surge, the city calls it an accident: a stubborn man trapped by a failed pump while saving his cargo. Kriminalhauptkommissarin Karin Brandt is not so quick. Her own brother drowned in this harbour, and she knows how Hamburg rounds its dead down to bad luck. A meticulous man's stopped watch, a tide table, three keys and one underlined email lead her through a family that wants the warehouse sold, a son drowning in debt, and a friend who grieves too helpfully.
The Invisible Load
There is a tiredness that doesn't come from what you did today — it comes from everything you had to remember. The dentist, the outgrown shoes, the birthday nine days away. This is the field guide that hands that invisible work to an AI assistant: the brain dump that empties the 3am swirl, the household command centre, and the one move that makes the load visible enough to finally share. Free in English and Czech.
The Cold Draught
Prague, winter 1934. An antiquarian is found drowned in a bolted bathroom above the Vltava. Chief Inspector Tobias Hron solves a wholly human murder of money and shame — but never explains the fifteenth guest at the dead man's last dinner, the one no record can prove ever lived. A literary mystery with one thread of the inexplicable. Free in English and Czech.
Hello, Claude
You've heard about AI assistants. Maybe you've even opened one, typed 'hello', and quietly closed the tab. This is the guide that picks up exactly there. No jargon, no hype — just the handful of habits that turn a blank text box into the most useful tool on your screen.
C# 14 in Depth
A 700+ page deep dive into modern C# for engineers who already ship C#. From the newest C# 14 language features to the runtime mechanics that decide performance — spans, the GC, async internals, SIMD, source generators, NativeAOT — with 500+ verified, idiomatic code examples. Free to read and download.