Heaven has gone corporate. The small gods are working the night shift.
Somewhere off every map, in the town of Novena Falls, an old celestial switchboard called the Ambry still answers the prayers too small for Head Office: the lost keys, the unsent letters, the courage to finish one more hour of a night shift. It's staffed by the patron saints of next-to-nothing - the goddess of the held bus, the keeper of lost things, a retired sun-god who now pours the second cup of coffee - and it has been quietly holding up the soft underside of the world for centuries.
Then a stranger washes ashore with no name, no memory, and a file with the most important line scraped out. Gil, he decides to call himself. He has one gift: the smallest sound in the world - psst - the nudge that makes a person pause, look again, and discover the door isn't shut yet.
He could not have arrived at a worse time. Head Office has dispatched an Auditor, the metrics are in, and everything too small to count is about to be Consolidated. If the Ambry is going to survive the cold arithmetic coming up the line, it will take every minor god on the board, one impossible act of accounting - and ninety seconds that have been quietly accruing for a hundred years.
A warm, funny, quietly devastating fantasy about bureaucracy, mercy, and the unmeasurable value of small things - for readers of Terry Pratchett, Good Omens, and The House in the Cerulean Sea.
Book One of the Patron Saints of Small Things series.
