- Published: 28/01/2021
- ISBN: 9781783786305
- Granta Books
- 272 pages
Ten Days
Austin Duffy
When Wolf’s recently-estranged wife Miriam dies from cancer, his entire world is turned upside down. Wolf and his daughter, Ruth, travel to New York from London to scatter Miriam’s ashes in the Hudson River. During the ten High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur they connect up with Miriam’s conservative Jewish family, who are adamantly against Miriam’s choice of burial. Battling the antagonism of Miriam’s Orthodox family, Wolf is also coming to terms with his own hopes to put right wrongs before it’s too late.
A tenderly written story of time, grief and memory, Ten Days delves deep into the complicated love between a father and daughter and the bonds of marriage over older family ties.
£12.99
Austin Duffy's uniquely dry, laconic style adds a subversive and compelling charge to this moving and intense story of the relationship between a father and daughter. A terrific novel
William Boyd
A family epic that eddies in the wider current of history, and an incrementally devastating story of grief, guilt and memory
Gavin Corbett, author of, This is the Way
The moral propulsion behind this sad, bittersweet tale, and its sheer cleverness, had me reading into the early hours... Duffy displays enormous skill and subtlety... [he] can delineate character well... [and] he can write beautifully too... This is a quietly wonderful novel, full of resonance yet unforgiving in its gaze, and one where, the more you look into it, the more you will find
Sunday Times
From the Same Author
This Living and Immortal Thing
Austin Duffy
This Living and Immortal Thing inhabits a world of medicine, research, cancer and death. Its disillusioned and often darkly funny narrator is an Irish oncologist, who is searching for a scientific breakthrough in the lab of a New York hospital while struggling with his failing marriage and his growing alienation within the city’s urban spaces. Tending to the health of his laboratory mice, he finds comfort in work that is measurable, results that are quantifiable.
But life is every bit as persistent as the illness he studies. As he starts a new treatment on his mice, he meets a beautiful but elusive Russian translator at the hospital, his estranged wife gets in touch and his supervisor pressures him to push ahead professionally. And always there is the pull of family, of the place he considers home.
Shot through with Duffy’s haunting, beautiful descriptions of the science underlying cancer, which starkly illustrate the paradox of an illness with a persistent and deadly life force at its heart, This Living and Immortal Thing shows how the cruelty of the disease is a price we pay for the joy and complexity of being in the world.
