The Nine Days of Harlow: A Novel

On the ninth morning, Harlow ends. On the tenth, Delia Cobb wakes on the first day again.Delia is the only nurse left in a West Virginia company town that has spent thirty years agreeing not to ask questions. The tremors in the men off the rendering floor are stress. The memory lapses are drink. Her husband's death was bad luck, and bad luck is nobody's fault.It is not stress. It has been in the town for years. It cannot be treated, and everyone who is going to get it already has.Warren Odell owns the plant, the clinic's funding, and the only road out. He knew. He also has it.Delia has nine days. She has had them before. Every loop she learns one more thing - a shipping manifest, a burial permit, a name on a form - and every loop the town dies anyway, in a different order, with different people alive at the end of it. Every loop she gets closer to Odell. Nothing she does to him brings the tenth morning.The loop has rules. They are not moral ones.The Nine Days of Harlow is an exacting, close-focused novel about a place that decided not to know, a woman who cannot stop counting, and the distance between being owed something and being able to collect it.