The Eighth Life
Description
An epic family saga beginning with the Russian Revolution and swirling across a century, encompassing war, loss, love requited and unrequited, ghosts, joy, massacres, tragedy. And hot chocolate.
At the start of the twentieth century, on the edge of the Russian empire, a family prospers. It owes its success to a delicious chocolate recipe, passed down the generations with great solemnity and caution. A caution which is justified: this is a recipe for ecstasy that carries a very bitter aftertaste...
Stasia learns it from her Georgian father and takes it north, following her new husband, Simon, to his posting at the center of the Russian Revolution in St Petersburg. Stasia's is only the first in a symphony of grand but all too often doomed romances that swirl from sweet to sour in this epic tale of the red century.
Tumbling down the years, and across vast expanses of longing and loss, generation after generation of this compelling family hears echoes and sees reflections. A ballet dancer never makes it to Paris and a singer pines for Vienna. Great characters and greater relationships come and go and come again; the world shakes, and shakes some more, and the reader rejoices to have found at last one of those glorious old books in which you can live and learn, be lost and found, and make indelible new friends.
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About the Author
Charlotte Collins studied English Literature at Cambridge University and worked as an actor and radio journalist in Germany and the UK before becoming a literary translator. Her co-translation, with Ruth Martin, of Nino Haratischvili'sThe Eighth Life won the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, and in 2017 she was awarded the Goethe-Institut's Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize for Robert Seethaler's A Whole Life. Other translations include Seethaler's The Tobacconist, Homeland by Walter Kempowski, and Olga by Bernhard Schlink.
Reviews
"Something rather extraordinary happened. The world fell away and I fell, wholly, happily, into the book...My breath caught in my throat, tears nestled in my lashes...devastatingly brilliant."
--Wendell Steavenson, The New York Times Book Review
"[A]n exceptional, deeply evocative saga of an elite Georgian family as they endure the 20th century's political upheavals, from before the Bolshevik Revolution through the post-Soviet era...In heartfelt prose, Haratischvili seamlessly weaves the political upheaval around the characters into the love and loss in their lives. Haratischvili's epic portrait of a close-knit family doubles as a stunning tribute to the power of resilience." STARRED REVIEW
--Publishers Weekly
"This novel has generated substantial industry buzz and international critical praise. Both are justified...The Eighth Life--the story of a family, a country, a century--is an imaginative, expansive, and important read." STARRED REVIEW
--Bethany Latham, Booklist
"If it's a family saga you're seeking, look no further than this grand tale...The author gracefully interweaves the historical backdrop of her novel with the lives of her characters, thus adding depth to her story. Heartily recommended." STARRED REVIEW
--Edward B. Cone, Library Journal
"This is a long, rewarding novel...ably translated through a collaborative process. It makes for an engrossing book. Haratischvili has created a fascinating cast (and it's easy to imagine it as a television series) whose lives illuminate some of the greatest events of the 20th century."
--Declan O'Driscoll, The Irish Times
"Elegant...it demonstrates a technical mastery, impressively sustained...The Eighth Life is more than a family saga: it is an ode, a lamentation, a monument--to Georgia, its people, its past and future."
--Bryan Karetnyk, TLS
"The Eighth Life is capacious, voluble, urgent, readable, translated heroically and sparklingly by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin."
--Julian Evans, The Telegraph
"Spanning six generations of a family between 1900 and the 21st century, its characters travel to Tbilisi, Moscow, London and Berlin in an epic story of doomed romance that combines humour with magic realism."
--Marta Bausells, The Guardian, 'Ten of the best new books in translation'
"Nino Haratischvili's elegant epic...is a triumph of both authorship and painstaking translation...The Eighth Life is an unforgettable love letter to Georgia and the Caucasus, to lives led and to come, and to writing itself."
--The Economist
"The Eighth Life...is a lavish banquet of family stories that can, for all their sorrows, be devoured with gluttonous delight. Nino Haratischvili's characters...come to exuberant life. Her huge novel...shows a double face, its crushing pain and loss nonetheless conveyed with an artful storyteller's sheer joy in her craft.."
--Boyd Tonkin, The Financial Times
"The novel of the year."
--Der Spiegel
"No doubt Nino Haratischwili is one of the most important voices in contemporary German literature."
--Die Zeit
"[T]his sprawling epic of love and loss...The Eighth Life is an expansive and hopeful tale centered on family touched by war and revolution."
--Foreword Reviews
"[T]his sprawling epic of love and loss...The Eighth Life is an expansive and hopeful tale centered on family touched by war and revolution."
--Elizabeth Buchan, Daily Mail
"Sometimes I wonder how many people harbor a secret desire to write a book about their family's entire history. I have certainly met enough women in my life who have expressed this explicitly, especially the stories shared by their mothers and grandmothers--the implication being that we don't get enough of these stories in literature or biographies. It is perhaps for this reason that reading Nino Haratischwili's The Eighth Life, translated by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin, feels so familiar, almost like a wish fulfilled...The Eighth Life has deservedly been compared to Tolstoy's War & Peace."
--Barbara Halla, Asymoptote
"[A]n epic--a magnificent, sprawling family saga that captures the suffering and pride of the Georgian people throughout the tumult of the twentieth century. The writing is rich and the characters full-blooded. Simply put, The Eighth Life is Georgia's Gone with the Wind."
--Words Without Borders
"Once I finished this amazing family tale, the gold is worn off the cover in places, but the memories that made for a story told well will remain with me. I felt part of this family as I traveled with them through time and history; as they shared with me all the threads of their woven carpet, generations old...I loved this amazing book."
--Shannon Alden, Literati Bookstore
"It's definitely the best work of fiction I've read in the last year."
--John Leake, Novel Bookstore
"The scope is Tolstoyan: the drama of War and Peace, the emotion of Anna Karenina...A sprinkling of Allendesque magic realism is added, along with a handful of spirits and a secret recipe for delicious and addictive hot chocolate that appears to curse those who drink it."
--Lizzy Siddal, The Riveter
"The Eighth Life is capacious, voluble, urgent, readable, translated heroically and sparklingly by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin."
--Julian Evans, Stuff
"If you only read one book this year make sure it is The Eighth Life...Intricately crafted and addictive, The Eighth Life is an extraordinary, dramatic and compelling read...The ambitious, vivid and unflinching translation from the original German by Ruth Martin and Charlotte Collins is in itself a work of art, and deserves to win every translation prize going."
--BookBlast
"[A] generational saga of 20th-century Georgia with the drama and grandeur to be Georgia's Gone With the Wind."
--Lit Hub
"Everybody requires a new, vigorous narrative of European ideals, of the European past...Nino Haratischwili has created this narrative in her new novel."
--Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung
"Nino Haratischwili has written a great book: a book which ranges over a century and half of the globe; a book however, within which--as in the infant's experience--everything is only love and dread. It is a coup!"
--Süddeutsche Zeitung
"Not only in its length does this novel resemble the work of Boris Pasternak. You will not want to put it down. The red century devours a family, and history comes with a pinch of chocolate--Like Water for Chocolate, even."
--Brigitte
"The Eighth Life is a sprawling family saga, to be savored for its grandeur, scope and scale...Interwoven with love, loss, trumps and tragedy are the uncanny impacts of a family recipe for divine hot chocolate, which just might carry a curse...enthralling and satisfying." FIVE STARS
--Maureen Eppen, Good Reading
"This multi-award winning novel is a riveting read...You too often want to pause and appreciate delightful twists, intriguing concepts, the catch-your-breath unexpected."
--The Australian
"The Eighth Life is the sort of book that sweeps you along, sustaining a tremendous feeling of urgency, as if the narrator...is desperate to get it all out, get it all on paper, before the family curse catches up with her."
--The Saturday Paper
