The Nine Faces

The people who left did better.

Iona Hain has taught the twelve Universal Laws for fifteen years, in hotel function rooms and leisure centres, on Tuesday nights with an urn in the boot of her car. She taught them well and she believed them. Then the company moved her onto the data, and she found the one table nobody had read.

Twenty years of members. Five systems on one spine. The people with the best lives five years on were the ones who had stopped paying.

She takes the file. Then she goes to find them. A bank nurse with nine years of sleep logs in a box on top of the fridge. A kitchen fitter with thirteen diaries in a crate under his workbench. A widow in Retford with the week of the ninth of March still on the whiteboard by the door. Nine kitchens. Nine records kept by people who had no idea what they were recording. Nine corrections to the laws she sold.

With a court order behind her, sixty-five pounds in her purse and a printer in Bathgate who has never set an instruction inside a front cover before, Iona has one road left to put the book on. It runs into a desert in Nevada, in the same week her old company fills an arena five hundred miles to the south.

The Nine Faces is a novel about what the wisdom industry gets right, what it gets wrong, and what actually happens in the lives of people who quietly stop believing and get better anyway. It is for readers who loved The Celestine Prophecy and wanted the evidence.

Included in full: Nine Keys, the short book Iona hands through car windows. Nine corrections, an author's note about a woman with shaking hands, and a page at the back with five names on it and nothing under them.