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by Nino Haratischvili
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.
What are you reading this week? And what did you think of last week’s books? (1/1/2026)
...Lost Bread by Edith Bruck which is a novelization of her experience during the Holocaust. Really good Now I'm ready to start my Q1 big book which is The Eighth Life by Nino Haratischvili. I think I will start the new Ian McEwan to read along with this.
-Anne_Glasgow
"In heartfelt prose, Haratischvili seamlessly weaves the political upheaval around the characters into the love and loss in their lives. Haratischivili's epic portrait of a close-knit family doubles as a stunning tribute to the power of resilience." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"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." - Library Journal (starred review)
"The Eighth Life—the story of a family, a country, a century—is an imaginative, expansive, and important read." - Booklist (starred review)
"[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
"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." - The Irish Times
"The novel of the year." - Der Spiegel
This information about The Eighth Life was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Nino Haratischvili was born in Georgia in 1983, and is an award-winning novelist, playwright, and theatre director. At home in two different worlds, each with their own language, she has been writing in both German and Georgian since the age of twelve. In 2010, her debut novel Juja was nominated for the German Book Prize, as was her most recent Die Katze und der General in 2018. In its German edition, The Eighth Life was a bestseller, and won the Anna Seghers Prize, the Lessing Prize Stipend, and the Bertolt Brecht Prize 2018. It is being translated into many languages, and has already been a major bestseller on publication in Holland, Poland, and Georgia.
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