Juja

Published for the first time in English, the sweeping debut novel set in bohemian Paris, by the author of international bestseller The Eighth Life.

In 1953, a teenage girl, Jeanne Sare, jumps in front of a train at the Gare du Nord station. She leaves behind writings that to some are unreadable, but to others tell universal, unspoken truths about the lives and struggles of women. When published in the 1970s, her work triggers a rash of copycat suicides. It is hastily withdrawn from sale and eventually forgotten about.

Then, in 2004, two women from opposite corners of the globe - Amsterdam and Sydney - rediscover Jeanne Sare's book and set out to discover who the author was and what happened to her.

Women across the ages have attached their own stories to Sare's, often with devastating results, but the truth about her may be even stranger than the fictions they have invented.

Praise for The Eighth Life:

'Something rather extraordinary happened. The world fell away and I fell, wholly, happily, into the book ... My breath caught in my throat, tears nestled in my lashes ... devastatingly brilliant.'

—Wendell Steavenson, The New York Times Book Review

'The Eighth Life ... is a lavish banquet of family stories that can, for all their sorrows, be devoured with gluttonous delight. Nino Haratischvili's characters ... come to exuberant life. Her huge novel ... shows a double face, its crushing pain and loss nonetheless conveyed with an artful storyteller's sheer joy in her craft.'

—Boyd Tonkin, The Financial Times

'A harrowing, heartening and utterly engrossing epic novel ... astonishing ... A subtle and compelling translation by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin should make this as great a literary phenomenon in English as it has been in German.'

—Maya Jaggi, The Guardian