A Lifetime of Impossible Days by Tabitha Bird is her first novel.
Meet Willa Waters, aged 8, 33 and 93.
On one impossible day at her home in Boonah, Queensland, 1965, eight-year-old Willa receives an ocean that arrives in a box. Written on a postcard stuck on the box is the instruction, ‘One ocean: plant in the backyard.’ After consulting her best friend and Chihuahua, Frog Dog, and donning her gumboots, she plants the ocean under the mango tree in the garden. In doing so she creates a magical time slip that lets her visit her future selves.
On one impossible day in 1990, Willa is now thirty-three and mother to two children, Eli and Sebastian. Awaking one morning, she discovers a box holding a jam jar full of water has arrived at the house. She follows the trail of water, which is now running through the house, and there in the backyard is her childhood self, Super gumboots Willa! As the child runs away, memories of her dark past return and she finds herself on the brink of a decision that will have heartbreaking consequences.
On one impossible day in 2050, Willa is a 93-year-old who still loves gumboots and the many other possessions in her home in Boonah, but her memory is fading fast. Her Carer, Katie, is preparing her for a move to the dreaded ‘HOME’, but Willa is refusing. She knows there’s something important she has to do involving the posting of two boxes and a warning to prevent a catastrophic event from happening in 1990.
Will the three Willas be able to heal their past and rescue their future, before it’s too late?
The only word to describe this wonderful first novel must be taken from the narrative itself and that word is “Amaze-a-loo!”
The three Willas – Super Gumboots Willa (8); Middle Willa (33) and Silver Willa (93) – are complex, astonishing characters that endear themselves immediately to the reader.
The narrative takes the reader from the epitomes of love, imagination and great joy to the depths of abusive family relationships, damaged souls and great despair. It tells of a Grandma’s love, the healing of broken spirits, the magical portal in time, a child’s imagination and the importance of gumboots.
A modern fairytale, which, like the best classics, takes the reader from enchanted to downhearted and tells of villains and heroes, a loveable pet, a magical sea, journeys fraught with peril and the overwhelming belief that things must be put right!
A page-turner and must-read for 2019. Do try the jam drops recipe; they’re amaze-a-loo too!
A Lifetime of Impossible Days is available in paperback and e-book
ISBN:9780143792260
Publisher: Penguin Australia
About Tabitha Bird
Tabitha Bird is a writer and poet who now lives and works in the rural township of Boonah, Queensland, where her novel is set. By day Tabitha may be found painting or working on her next book. Her Chihuahua, husband and three sons are all the reason she needs to believe there is still magic in this world.
In a bayside suburb of Queensland, Australia, Tabitha Bird grew up in a garden. It wasn’t much of a garden, but she told stories to ferns and weeds alike and gave herself something to hope in that was bigger than she was. Eventually, she had to leave the garden and do responsible things like grow up. When her own children came along she read stories with gumption and wild joy and got to thinking that perhaps she had some of her own to tell. The first whispering of story she heard was from a forgotten child that lived in that long-ago garden.
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