Reviews of The Ninth Life of Louis Drax by Liz Jensen

Book Summary

The story of a family falling apart, told in the vivid voices of its comatose son and Dr. Dannachet as he is drawn into the family's circle. Full of astonishing twists and turns, this is a masterful tale of the secrets the human mind can hide.

Meet Louis Drax, the Amazing Accident-Prone Boy.


Louis Drax is a boy like no other. He is brilliant and strange, and every year something violent seems to happen to him. His psychologist is baffled, and his mother lives in constant panic. He has always managed to survive — to land on his feet, like a cat. But cats have only nine lives, and Louis has used up eight, one for every year.

On his ninth birthday, Louis goes on a picnic with his parents and falls off a cliff. The details are shrouded in mystery. Louis's mother is shell-shocked; his father has vanished. And after some confusion Louis himself, miraculously alive but deep in a coma, arrives at Dr. Pascal Dannachet's celebrated coma clinic.

Was the fall a mere accident? If anyone knows, they're not telling. Until one day, still deep within his coma, Louis meets the bandaged figure who calls himself Gustave, and begins to tell his tale…

The Ninth Life of Louis Drax is the story of a family falling apart, told in the vivid voices of its comatose son and Dr. Dannachet as he is drawn into the Draxes' circle. Full of astonishing twists and turns, this is a masterful tale of the secrets the human mind can hide.

Liz Jensen says.... "The inspiration for Louis Drax came from my own grandmother’s death in Switzerland in the 1930s. Her body was found at the bottom of a cliff, three days after her eldest son had vanished from the face of the earth. The mystery of how my grandmother died, and what happened to her lost son, was never solved. It cast a shadow across the whole family, and when I first heard it as a child, it haunted me.

But I didn’t want to write that story. Instead, I wanted to explore the emotions it evoked. I wanted to write something from the point of view of a young boy because I love the way my own boys talk, and I wanted to capture that playground idiolect. I don’t think that when I started writing the novel, it was going to turn out so dark. But it ended up as a ghost story. If it has an unsettling effect on people, I’m glad. It’s meant to. It was sometimes harrowing to write, because it took me to places I didn’t really want to go. But that’s part of what writing is about. It’s the risk and it’s the adventure. And reading is the same.