Amanda Curtin imagines fragile acts of care among the homeless in Paris

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.

Review: Six Days by Amanda Curtin (Upswell Publishing) Structured across six days in February 2012, the novel moves between Daniel’s present-day narrative and a series of interconnected stories stretching across occupied Paris, postwar France, the student protests of 1968 and contemporary Catalonia.

The result is an ambitious, deeply layered work that asks how lives become entangled across generations.

Survival and a moral compass Daniel is easily Curtin’s most compelling character.

She excels at portraying the exhausting, daily labour of sobriety.

Daniel’s life is governed by routine, a strategy developed to keep addiction at bay.

He repeats the mantra he and his friend Marcelline developed together: “ROUTINE DISTRACTION REMEMBER THINK AHEAD.” The phrase functions as both a practical survival strategy and a moral compass.

Daniel is often prickly, judgemental and self-deprecating, but Curtin prevents him from becoming a caricature of either recovery or failure.

Rather, she captures the relentless negotiation required to remain sober.

Throughout the novel, craving is a palpable force, repeatedly described as “The Thirst”.

Its recurring appearances provide some of the novel’s strongest passages, conveying addiction as an ongoing, relentless condition.