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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
32 booksTroy Harwood-Jones is a Canadian author of literary fiction, fantasy, and middle-grade fiction. His novels range from the Dickensian fantasy of The Elevation of Copper Blackcoat to the middle-grade diary fiction of the Dear Maybe series, set in small-town Manitoba. His literary fiction includes In the Matter of Jane, a speculative novel about personhood and the law, and These Particular Waters, a lighthouse keeper’s memoir and family saga set on the BC coast. A practicing lawyer, he lives in Canada.
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