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a Small Miscalculation
Annie Hawthorne died on a Thursday. The funeral was lovely.
She planned it that way.
Now Annie is dead — and still managing. From a cemetery bench, she watches the living misplace flowers, misunderstand procedure, and make decisions without consulting her. Heaven is silent. Hell remains theoretical. The afterlife, if this is it, appears to be badly organized.
When Joel, Annie’s husband, eventually joins her, he isn’t punished. He’s assigned a role. A decent man whose greatest talent has always been waiting too long, Joel discovers that avoidance scales remarkably well inside a bureaucracy. What begins as harmless delay becomes policy. What looks like efficiency turns into absence.
A Small Miscalculation is a darkly comic novel about marriage, grief, and the systems people build to avoid choosing. Dry, precise, and quietly devastating, it examines what happens when love persists — and responsibility is endlessly deferred.
She planned it that way.
Now Annie is dead — and still managing. From a cemetery bench, she watches the living misplace flowers, misunderstand procedure, and make decisions without consulting her. Heaven is silent. Hell remains theoretical. The afterlife, if this is it, appears to be badly organized.
When Joel, Annie’s husband, eventually joins her, he isn’t punished. He’s assigned a role. A decent man whose greatest talent has always been waiting too long, Joel discovers that avoidance scales remarkably well inside a bureaucracy. What begins as harmless delay becomes policy. What looks like efficiency turns into absence.
A Small Miscalculation is a darkly comic novel about marriage, grief, and the systems people build to avoid choosing. Dry, precise, and quietly devastating, it examines what happens when love persists — and responsibility is endlessly deferred.
221 pages, Paperback
Published January 4, 2026
About the author
Troy Harwood-Jones
33 booksI'm a Canadian dad, a lawyer when I have to be, and an obsessive author the rest of the time. I've completed novels across a range of genres — fantasy, historical fiction, middle-grade adventure, dark comedy, literary fiction — which is less a sign of versatility than an inability to stop.
My work tends toward sardonic narrators in broken institutions: bureaucracies that grind people down, legal systems that serve themselves, afterlives with too much paperwork. The tone is usually dark enough to mean something and funny enough to get away with it.
I live in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where the winters are long enough to justify most of it.
My work tends toward sardonic narrators in broken institutions: bureaucracies that grind people down, legal systems that serve themselves, afterlives with too much paperwork. The tone is usually dark enough to mean something and funny enough to get away with it.
I live in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where the winters are long enough to justify most of it.
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