The Eighth Life (for Brilka): A Novel

Summary

LONGLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE

WINNER OF THE WARWICK PRIZE FOR WOMEN IN TRANSLATION

“Devastatingly brilliant. . . . Poignant, heart-stopping, sublime.” —New York Times Book Review

War and Peace for the twenty-first century, the internationally bestselling, award-winning multigenerational epic that begins with the Russian Revolution and spans a century—a novel of 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 from generation to generation with great care and caution. A caution which is justified: it 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 in St. Petersburg, the center of the Russian Revolution. 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.

Moving across years and vast expanses of longing and loss, each succeeding generation of this remarkable family hears echoes and sees reflections of their past. A ballet dancer’s dream of performing in Paris never comes to fruition; a singer pines for Vienna. These and other unforgettable characters engage in larger-than-life relationships that come and go and come again; their world shakes and shakes more. A grand and sweeping epic, The Eighth Life (for Brilka) is one of those glorious classic books that readers can embrace and learn, be lost and found, and make indelible new friends.

Translated from the German by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin