Some towns keep a night. This one keeps its pipes.

Perpetua Calloway is forty-one, a surveyor, and very good at things that can be measured. When the old iron water main under her childhood town begins to hum, she comes home to write a report that will recommend its replacement. It should take a week.

Instead she finds a town that leaves cups of water by the tap, an old woman who has kept a book of the night for sixty-one years, a boy with a recorder, a plumber who is still carrying her father's work, and a child who has the middle of a song nobody has ever finished.

A vote is coming. So is Low Water. And whatever answers in the dark is not asking to be explained.

The Night the Pipes Sang is a warm, strange, slow-turning story about home, work, grief, and the small stubborn acts of paying attention.