The Department of Small Lost Things

Otis Crumb has never lost anything in his life. Give him a runaway marble, a missing house key, a whole backlog of odd socks, and he'll have them found and filed inside three minutes flat — all from the one-shelf lost-property empire he runs out of a shoebox in his bedroom. Finding things is the only thing he's properly famous for. It's the family law, cross-stitched and everything: a Crumb never loses anything.

Then Otis loses the one thing that truly matters.

It's his late grandad's lucky coin — the very coin the Astonishing Crumb used to pull from behind your ear on the pier with a flourish and a whispered now you see it. Worn smooth, always somehow warm, it's the last warm thing Otis has left of him. And on a grey, wind-bitten Monday, it slips through his cold fingers, rolls the way coins only roll when it matters, and drops clean through a seafront drain into the dark.

For a boy who can find anything, losing this breaks him nearly in half.

And then, behind the radiator in the school lost-property cupboard, a tiny brass door no taller than a teapot creaks open — and a flustered, paperclip-shaped clerk leans out and demands he fill in a form. Beyond it lies the Department of Small Lost Things: a vast, dusty, gloriously peculiar office where creatures called Sundries catalogue every button, milk tooth, and single mitten the world has ever mislaid. Somewhere in here is Otis's coin. But a thief is unpicking the whole place thread by thread, and getting the coin back will mean doing the one thing Otis has never once managed — the one thing his grief won't let him do.

Warm, funny, and quietly enormous of heart, this is a story about finding, losing, and the astonishing magic tucked behind an ordinary radiator.

Open the little brass door. Step inside.