The Night Shift Almanac, Vol. 5: Signals

About this book

Every message finds its hour. Some can only arrive at night. Volume Five of The Night Shift Almanac listens to a single unnamed Malaysian city between midnight and six in the morning, when the lines are quiet and the people still awake are the ones paid, or compelled, to keep listening. Here are the city's receivers: a young technician keeping watch over a copper telephone exchange on its last night, a call-centre agent who answers the same gentle wrong number at 1:11 every morning, a tower rigger who climbs into the quiet band where unsent messages drift like fireflies, a night engineer nursing a dying server through its final delivery of letters written to the future, and a retiring air traffic controller whose oldest flight checks in one last time.