Objective Achieved, Method Unclear

Some departments prevent wars. This one makes sure you miss your bus.

Nigel Pratt spent eleven years inspecting fire extinguishers. Then the depot closed, and his second-hand kettle sent him three weeks into the future.

Which is how he ends up at the Ministry of Negligible Events: four people in a converted Victorian post office whose job is to make sure small things happen. A woman must miss her bus. A man must pick up a croissant wrapper. A parking space must stay empty. Nobody ever explains why, and Nigel has never once done it the way the brief intended. He has, however, succeeded forty-one times in a row.

That is precisely what worries Assistant Director Ashworth-Pine of the far better-carpeted Bureau of Significant

Developments, who would rather the money went on things that actually matter. He sends Verity Fenwick, armed with a clipboard and the entire employee handbook, to document the department’s failures. She finds that the kettle works, and that nobody can say how.

The department has sixty days. The kettle, it turns out, never needed one.

Objective Achieved, Method Unclear is a warm, sharply funny novel about bureaucracy, grief, and the small, unrecorded kindnesses that quietly hold the world together.

For readers who love Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams and anyone who has ever done the right thing and then been asked to fill in a form about it.