Scribe is excited to announce the publication of The Eighth Life by Nino Haratischvili this October, and to reveal the stunning cover. We think it is one of the most remarkable novels Scribe has ever acquired. We're sure you didn't know you were waiting for the Great Georgian Novel, especially when it comprises 944 pages, but we think you won’t be able to resist its charms.
It is a novel that has entranced almost a million Europeans already, in Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Spain, Bulgaria, and more. Now, translated by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin, it will finally meet its first English readers.
This is a family saga; intelligent, meaty, vivid and captivating. Never clichéd, never dull, never hollow. A mesmerising dance of life and love in front of a dazzling succession of scenes from history’s bloodiest century, the Red Century.
‘That night Stasia took an oath, swearing to learn the recipe by heart and destroy the paper. And when she was lying in her bed again, recalling the taste with all her senses, she was sure that this secret recipe could heal wounds, avert catastrophes, and bring people happiness. But she was wrong.’
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 centre of the Russian Revolution in St Petersburg. But Stasia’s will be but the first of 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. 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.
‘The novel of the year.’
Der Spiegel
‘Nino Haratischvili is one of the most important voices in contemporary German literature.’
Die Zeit
‘Everybody requires a new, vigorous narrative of European ideals, of the European past ... Nino Haratischvili has created this narrative in her new novel ... Phenomenal.’
Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung
