What do you do when your amazing, beautiful, beloved sister dies?Hide in your room for two years.Sleep with a very, very wrong man.Leave home and start a new life, lying to everyone you meet including your kind employer, your curious friends and the man you love?Pip Mitchell’s an expert at making seriously bad decisions. But when her past, present and future collide at the Sydney Olympic Games, she’s going to have to decide whose side she’s on – or she’ll lose everyone she loves. Reviews This book is in my top 5 surprise books of the year – I loved the sound of it, I’d seen good reviews about it, but I still didn’t fully know what to expect. So I went into No Number Nine not really knowing what to expect, and I came out of it with a fuzzy feeling in my chest and a stupid grin on my face.- beautifulbookland.com Globally, hockey is the second most played team sport and the third most played of all sports – yet it seems to be almost entirely absent from popular culture. Huh. So much so that a ‘hockey novel’ is a very niche, almost unique prospect. That was the main reason I was initially interested in reading No Number Nine when I was offered the opportunity, and I’m glad I did. Though accessible to the lay-person – anyone could enjoy this story – being a hockey player adds an extra dimension to your appreciation of the book; especially given how accurately the dynamics and complications of a large hockey club are rendered.The story itself is a Bildungsroman (a coming-of-age-story in Germany) with a funny, conversational narrative which means it is easy to read and hard to put down – but that’s not to say it’s frothy or frivolous, it deals with complex and difficult issues in a comprehensive yet engaging way.Ideal holiday reading in normal times, great isolation reading in today’s. The plot is like a good hockey game: fast-paced, exciting, end-to-end stuff with a result that is somehow simultaneously unpredictable and inexorable.- Simon Moriarty
