Six Days, a new novel by Amanda Curtin (August 2026 release)
Wonderful lead review in the SMH/Age/WA Today on 29 August by Cameron Woodhead and Steven Carroll of Amanda Curtin's novel Six Days:
Six Days by Amanda Curtin (Upswell, $32.99)
"With wildfires burning through France and Spain over this European summer, it’s easy to forget the deep freeze that descended on Paris in the winter of 2012. Amanda Curtin’s latest takes place over six days during that extreme weather event, which brought sub-zero temperatures to the French capital. It unfolds through Daniel, an Australian expat who’s gone native after four decades in Paris. He’s having a dark night of the soul and seeks a road back to the good. Daniel’s perambulations around the Latin Quarter, with an old dog in tow, spawn myriad vignettes, as the hidden interconnections between citizens, and the forces that divide them, emerge.
Anyone who loves Paris will be struck by this beautifully written love letter to the city, and the constraint of the premise seems to liberate the author’s imaginative ambit. Walking novels have a strong pedigree as vehicles for literary and philosophical meditation – think W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, or Teju Cole’s Open City – and this essayistic anatomy of Paris is elevated to that level by the clarity, sophistication and lyricism brought to pressing concerns, from sexual assault to homelessness, that lie in the city’s shadows."
