For Georgia, I read The Eighth Life (For Brilka) by Nino Haratischvili. It was translated from German to English by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin, and their translation won the English PEN award. I cannot emphasize enough (1) how much I loved this book and (2) how inadequate I feel to capture its essence in a blog post.
Let’s address the book’s length first since that will be the biggest stumbling block for most readers. The English edition weighs in at 934 pages, but these pages will suck you in and leave you wanting more. It took me about three and a half weeks to read The Eighth Life (For Brilka) in March 2025, which is a long time for me, but my days were ridiculously busy thanks to my kids’ sports schedules. I was basically a part-time chauffeur with all their practices and games. That fact that I managed to finish this book in March 2025 is testament to just how damn good it is. If I’d been reading it during the summer, I probably would have inhaled it in less than two weeks.
(For those of you following my Brazilian side quest, you already know I’m obsessed with Avenida Brasil. I just finished Episode 132. Well, this book was so freaking good, I sometimes skipped my daily dose of Carminha and Nina so I could spend more time in Georgia. If you’ve watched Avenida Brasil, then that’s all you need to know. You can skip the rest of this post and just get the book already.)
The Eighth Life is a family saga that begins in the country of Georgia at the beginning of the Red Century. We begin with Stasia, whose father has created a chocolate recipe that is so dangerously delicious, it might be cursed, The novel follows the lives of Stasia and her descendants during the rise and fall of the Soviet Union and travels from the countryside of Georgia to Georgia’s capital Tbilisi and then even farther afield to Moscow, Berlin, Vienna, and London. Haratischvili brings these settings to life in a way that reminded me of Isabel Allende and The House of the Spirits (Chile).
Haratischvili masterfully weaves together fiction and nonfiction. The story is mostly fiction, detailing the romances and tragedies of a family, but there are beautiful passages that explain the relevant history and politics. By the end of the book, the fictional family saga felt so real, I was convinced that Haratischvili must have been inspired by her own family’s stories. It’s some of the best historical fiction I’ve ever read, bringing me into the experience of trying to stay human during the Soviet era. The story conveys such anguish, I wish I could pretend that Haratischvili was just trying to craft a “good story” but alas, having read Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (Belarus), I know that Haratischvili’s fiction conveys the truth of what actually happened.
I could sing the praises of this book all day — the writing! the characters! the feelings! — and I’m so grateful that folks on social media were vocal about this recommendation. If I could travel back in time, I’d love to take a college course on post-Soviet literature and write a paper about this book–except the author is a few years younger than me, so I couldn’t have read this in college–but maybe somewhere in the multiverse… This book left its fingerprints on my soul and made me want to spend the next five years of my life writing a big sprawling family saga, The world needs more books like The Eighth Life (For Brilka) and we also need translators like Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin, who are ready, willing and able to translate these masterpieces.