Nine Days by Toni Jordan

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The sobering reality of World War Two, and the September 11 attacks in New York orient the domestic drama of Toni Jordan’s Nine Days; an intergenerational examination of the Westaway’s response to change. Spanning three generations, the individual stories of the nine contributors to the narrative reveal the ways in which external events impact individual choice. Each story details a response to change and the adversity that is often associated with unanticipated outcomes. The alternating chapters that move seemingly randomly, between the late 1930s, and forward in time to 2010, have the Rowena Parade residence of the Westaway household, as a unifying thread. It is the identifiable geography of streets that change over the years but retain, nonetheless, aspects of the past, that reveal the importance of continuity and tradition. Whilst family rituals become a uniting thread that anchors Alec and a new generation of Westaways, traditions are as much about invention as they are about continuity. Family histories are, it seems a conflation of myth and fabrication, of truth, and embellishment. What makes them real, are the myth-makers. In this regard, the disparate and individuated stories that form the novel, are bound together by Kip Westaway, a constant in a world of change.