Six Days

by Amanda Curtin

Daniel, an expatriate Australian who has lived in Paris for more than forty years, has made a mess of his life and is trying to atone, to become the ‘good man’ his friend Marcelline believes him to be. But the quotidian world has been tipped out of balance and Daniel makes an error of judgment that places at risk everything he values.

Set in the Latin Quarter of Paris over six days in the winter of 2012, Daniel’s story is woven through with interconnecting vignettes that reach back to war and occupation, the revolutionary sixties, riots in a Catalan town in the south of France, a grassroots movement to make visible the invisible homeless. The personal stitched into, and inseparable from, the political.

Paperback

First published August 3, 2026

About the author

Amanda Curtin is the author of Six Days (novel, 2026), Kathleen O’Connor of Paris (narrative non-fiction, 2018), Elemental (novel, Australia/NZ 2013, UK 2016), The Sinkings (novel, 2008) and Inherited (short fiction collection, 2011). She lives in suburban Perth, Western Australia—traditional lands of the Whadjuk people of the Noongar nation—and works in a backyard studio among magpies, doves and old trees.

Reviews

[Robyn Mundy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was invited to read an ARC of this heart-wrenching story that gripped me from first page to last. The writing is spare and evocative, while Paris, as a place of hardship, is both raw and strangely intimate. To walk these streets with the protagonist Daniel (and his beloved dog) is to be in the skin of a man stripped of all but compassion, each surrendering to kindness poised to bring him down. I loved Six Days. Exquisite. Aching. Real.