Nine Days • Toni Jordan

The tiniest things - a coin, a pendant, a photograph, a lie - can make or ruin lives. It is 1939. Deep in the working-class Melbourne suburb of Richmond Kip Westaway, failed scholar and stablehand, is about to live through the most important day in his young life as Australia hovers unknowingly on the brink of war. What happens that day is the catalyst for momentous events strung across eight more moments in time; love and deception, near-misses and misunderstandings, all centred around the terrible thing that happens to a young girl and the repercussions it will have on the lives of her family, even those not yet born.. Toni Jordan's NINE DAYS is a beautiful, heartbreaking novel, a masterful piece of writing filled to bursting with warm, funny, spiky, lovable characters. It is the story of a tragedy, and the ripples that spread outwards from it through the generations, for better or worse. It is a book you will want to pass on, if you can bear to let it go.