Fiction
The Missing Hour
A novel about the time we lose — and who profits from taking it
One morning, an unnamed Italian city wakes to discover that an hour has gone missing. It has not vanished into the supernatural. It has been quietly stolen by everyday life.
A city wakes one morning and discovers that an hour has gone missing.
The bells ring the wrong number of times. Clocks disagree. Timetables begin to lose their authority.
But The Missing Hour is not really a story about broken clocks.
The hour has been taken somewhere far more familiar.
It has disappeared into queues, forms, eligibility rules, priority doors, private lanes, appointments, bureaucratic rituals and all the small systems through which one person’s time becomes less valuable than another’s.
That was the idea behind the novel I wrote in 2025.
And I am now making the complete book available to read free.
A city that could be anywhere
The story takes place in an unnamed Italian seaside city.
I deliberately never named it.
It has old streets, apartment blocks, courtyards, washing lines, bureaucracy, cafés, salt, diesel, espresso and the weight of centuries underneath the ordinary business of getting through the day.
But it is not really about Italy.
The city is meant as a mirror.
If you recognise your own streets in it, you are not mistaken.
At the centre of the story is Luca, a cartographer at the City Archive. An old map leads him to a street that should no longer exist and, eventually, to the Archivio — a strange, modest room containing records not only of forgotten streets, but of abandoned possibilities.
From there, Luca and an unlikely group of companions begin following the missing hour through the city’s institutions.
They discover people who make money from delay.
Clinics where not waiting has become a luxury.
Public offices where access depends on knowing the right route.
Schools, shelters and welfare systems that consume the time of precisely those who have the least of it.
Digital systems that promise choice while quietly deciding which choices are available.
And institutions that turn inherited advantage into something called merit.
Not a revolution. Something more difficult.
The characters do not overthrow the city.
That would have made the story much easier.
Instead, they start changing small things.
A chair in a corridor.
A person at a door.
A rule that has to state who bears its cost.
A timetable that admits uncertainty.
A public ledger showing where time is being lost.
A street that is allowed to exist because it makes people’s lives easier.
The changes are small, reversible and sometimes ridiculous.
That is deliberate.
Because The Missing Hour is ultimately interested in a question that is much less spectacular than revolution:
What would happen if institutions were required to notice the time they take from people?
The tyranny of merit
Running beneath the satire is another argument.
We are extraordinarily fond of explaining people’s circumstances through individual merit.
Success becomes evidence of deserving.
Failure becomes evidence of deficiency.
What disappears from the story are all the invisible structures underneath both: money, time, family, housing, education, networks, safety, opportunity and the thousand quiet advantages that rarely appear on a medal.
In the novel, one demand keeps returning:
Print the ladder with the medal.
Because if we are going to celebrate where somebody arrived, intellectual honesty requires us to look at what helped them climb.
And then there is freedom
The deeper question in The Missing Hour concerns freedom itself.
How free is a choice when all the important choices have already been made elsewhere?
How meaningful is personal responsibility when one person begins with time, security and options while another begins with forms, waiting rooms and penalties?
The novel’s answer is deliberately uncomfortable:
Freedom is infrastructural.
It depends partly on the world we build around people.
And if human systems can be designed to waste lives, they can also be redesigned to stop doing it.
That is the modest hope at the centre of the story.
No perfect society arrives.
No hero fixes everything.
The city merely learns, imperfectly, to return some of the hours it had been taking.
Read The Missing Hour free
I wrote The Missing Hour in 2025.
Rather than leave it sitting quietly on a hard drive, I would rather have it read.
So the complete novel is available free.
DOWNLOAD THE MISSING HOUR — FREE PDF ↗
No payment.
No account with me.
Just the book.
If you read it, I hope at some point you find yourself looking at an ordinary queue, form, timetable or closed door slightly differently.
Because the missing hour was never really missing.
Someone was using it.