This novel has generated substantial industry buzz and international critical praise. Both are justified. As the twentieth century dawns, a patriarch builds a successful confectionary business. His chocolate recipe is closely guarded; the sublime concoction in its purest form brings a curse. His daughter, Stasia, is entrusted with the recipe, but despite her warnings, family members down the generations partake and lives are upended. Like other sprawling Slavic epics, the backdrop is war, revolution, terrible repression and want. But this is not a Russian epic, it is a Georgian epic, and this distinctively flavors the narrative. As the narrator says, "I think our country can really be very funny (by which I mean not only tragic)." Haratischvili has a compelling, clear-eyed perspective on her homeland. Though far from polemical, the novel should be required reading for those lacking the historical and ideological understanding of what socialism does to those forced to live under it. Stasia is perhaps the most vivid, but each of the multitude of unique characters is similarly vibrant and entirely real, their lives resonant. Don't let the page count deter; The Eighth Life--the story of a family, a country, a century--is an imaginative, expansive, and important read.

Haratischvili's English-language debut is an 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 Tbilisi, Georgia, in 2006, 32-year-old Niza Jashi recounts a staggering series of tales to her 12-year-old niece, Brilka. Niza begins with the story of her great-great-grandfather, a successful chocolate maker who brought fortune to the family with a mythically addictive recipe in the early 20th century, then turns to her great-grandmother Stasia, a promising dancer who married an anti-communist White Guard lieutenant just before the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. Niza tells Brilka about the unconditional love Stasia bestowed on Niza as a child (which was withheld from everyone else in Stasia's family), the death of Stasia's younger half-sister in the 1991--1992 Georgian uprising after the collapse of the U.S.S.R., and Brilka's mother, Daria, Niza's sister, a beautiful young actress until her tragic downfall in the '90s. 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. (Apr.)