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As much-loved Australian novelist Toni Jordan sees it, some writers have ideas banked up like circling planes waiting for their turn to land, but her creative mind is more like a desert, occasionally crossed by tumbleweed. Well, that’s some impressive tumbleweed that’s rolling along on the breeze! In her debut novel, Addition, Toni Jordan introduces […]

Toni Jordan’s much-anticipated third novel hit stores this week and the response has been sensational. Peter Pierce called Nine Days ’a triumph’, comparing it to the work of Charles Dickens and Patrick White, and this epic story of love, folly and heartbreak has already won over many readers.

Nine Days was inspired by the beautiful photograph displayed on its cover, an image of a woman hoisted on the shoulders of two soldiers and farewelling another as he is shipped off to war. The picture is a mystery: dated 14 August 1940 and found by Publisher Michael Heyward on the State Library of Victoria website, the photograph has no caption and the identity of the lovers (siblings? friends?) is unknown. If you recognise anyone in the picture or can give any more information, email the Age. We’d love to get to the bottom of it!

From Text Publishing

The book blurb:

It is 1939 and although Australia is about to go to war, it doesn’t quite realise yet that the situation is serious. Deep in the working-class Melbourne suburb of Richmond it is business – your own and everyone else’s – as usual. And young Kip Westaway, failed scholar and stablehand, is living the most important day of his life. Kip’s momentous day is one of nine that will set the course for each member of the Westaway clan in the years that follow. Kip’s mother, his brother Francis and, eventually, Kip’s wife Annabel and their daughters and grandson: all find their own turning points, their triumphs and catastrophes, in days to come. But at the heart of all their stories is Kip, and at the centre of Kip’s fifteen-year-old heart is his adored sister Connie. They hold the threads that will weave a family. In Nine Days Toni Jordan has harnessed all the spiky wit, compassion and lust for life that drew readers in droves to Addition and Fall Girl. Ambitious in scope and structure, triumphantly realised, this is a novel about one family and every family. It is about dreams and fights and sacrifices. And finally, of course, it is – as it must be – about love. 

Buy the book here…