The Cartographer of Lost Hours

About this book

In the coastal city of Vellmare, the tide washes up lost hours: small glass beads, each holding an hour someone wasted, forgot or slept through. The poor rake them from the sand at dawn. The rich swallow them to live longer. The Bureau of Temporal Weights taxes every one, and it keeps the city's clocks in perfect, unbending agreement. Ines Varga used to map where the hours land, until she noticed they arrived in patterns and the Bureau fired her for it. Now she rakes the beach with a bad knee, a sharp tongue and a debt to dangerous people. Then she finds a bead that is warm. Inside is an hour that hasn't happened yet: the great tide-clock shattering and the sea standing still. With a lighthouse keeper who hasn't aged in forty years, and hunted by the mentor who fired her, Ines has twenty-three days to learn who is sending time backwards, and why.