Amanda Curtin’s Six Days opens with a girl dying in a Paris cemetery in 1991, during one of the coldest winters the city has experienced in years. More than two decades later, another vulnerable figure emerges: Daniel Despard, an Australian expatriate, recovering alcoholic and building caretaker. His carefully regulated life is disrupted by the arrival of a young homeless girl.
What follows is a novel concerned with homelessness, addiction, grief and loss – as well as the fragile acts of care that make survival possible.