In this paper, a novel general small-scale fading model for wireless communications, that describes the nonhomogeneous nature of the propagation medium, is introduced. Its probability density function (PDF) is given by a simple, exact, and closed-form expression. Namely, the η - λ - μ includes the λ - μ, the η - μ, the gamma, the exponential, the Hoyt, the Nakagami-m, the Rayleigh, and the one-sided Gaussian distributions as special cases. Field measurements and Monte Carlo simulation have been used to validate the proposed distribution. An outperformance has been shown among the widely known fading distributions by fitting to the experimental data.