Free Live Free

Free Live Free is a novel by the American writer Gene Wolfe, first published in 1984 as a limited edition from a small press. It appeared in a mass-market edition the following year, and in 1999 it was republished by Tor Books with an appendix intended to untangle some of the more serpentine elements of its plot.

Mr Free has a house that is slated for demolition, and the advertisement he places in a newspaper promises free living quarters to anybody who helps him find a mysterious object lost inside it. The four strangers who answer it are a mystic, a private investigator, a prostitute and a salesman.

The novel sticks closely to what its characters themselves notice, and it holds back from explaining very much: the reader may not realise until the final chapter that this is a science fiction story at all. Reviewers described it as an uneasy mix of fantasy, science fiction and mystery, and it has never fitted neatly into any of them. It takes a while for the four of them to understand what they have been asked to look for, and longer for them to agree on how to go about it.