Nino Haratischwili Books
Nino Haratischwili was born in 1983 in Tbilisi, Georgia, and has lived in Germany since 2003. She is a novelist, playwright, and director whose works have received numerous awards, including the Leipzig Book Fair Prize and the Schiller Memorial Prize.
Known for: The Eighth Life (For Brilka)
Books by Nino Haratischwili
The Eighth Life (For Brilka)
The Eighth Life (For Brilka) is a vast, emotionally charged family saga in which private lives are inseparable from political catastrophe. Spanning much of the twentieth century and beyond, Nino Haratischwili follows six generations of the Jashi family as they move through the collapse of empire, Stalinism, war, repression, disillusionment, and the fragile freedoms of the post-Soviet world. At the center of the novel is Niza, who writes the family’s story for her young niece Brilka, hoping to make sense of the secrets, wounds, and patterns that have shaped them all. What makes this novel so powerful is its scale and intimacy at once. It is not simply a historical chronicle of Georgia and the Soviet Union, but a study of how history enters the home: through marriages, betrayals, absences, ambitions, and inherited fear. Haratischwili writes with the authority of someone deeply connected to Georgia’s fractured modern history while also bringing the distance and craft of a major contemporary European novelist. The result is an epic that feels both monumental and painfully personal, reminding readers that the grand narratives of nations are ultimately lived out in individual bodies, memories, and families.
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Stasia and the Fall of Empire
History rarely announces itself politely; more often, it breaks into ordinary life and rearranges everything. That is the atmosphere in which the Jashi family first emerges. In the early twentieth century, Georgia still exists under the shadow of the Russian Empire, and Stasia, the daughter of a cel...
From The Eighth Life (For Brilka)
Christine’s Passion Under the Red Star
Desire can feel like freedom, but in a totalitarian world it often becomes another route to destruction. If Stasia embodies endurance, her sister Christine embodies dangerous intensity. She is brilliant, seductive, restless, and unwilling to accept the narrow life offered to her. Under Soviet rule, ...
From The Eighth Life (For Brilka)
Kitty and Kostya: Children of the Regime
The most effective political systems do not merely command obedience; they shape the emotional lives of children. Through Kitty and Kostya, Haratischwili explores what it means to grow up inside a regime that presents itself as destiny. They inherit not only a family name and private wounds, but als...
From The Eighth Life (For Brilka)
Elene and the Burden of Aftermath
After war ends, suffering does not end with it; it simply changes form. Elene’s story unfolds in the heavy atmosphere of the postwar years, when survival itself has become ordinary and exhaustion settles over daily life like dust. Haratischwili is especially perceptive here about the emotional textu...
From The Eighth Life (For Brilka)
Secrets as Family Inheritance
Families often inherit not just stories, but strategic silences. One of the most striking ideas in The Eighth Life (For Brilka) is that secrecy functions like an invisible heirloom. The Jashi family passes down names, habits, resentments, and objects, but also omissions. People disappear from conver...
From The Eighth Life (For Brilka)
Daria and Niza After the Collapse
When empires fall, freedom arrives unevenly, carrying both relief and wreckage. In the stories of Daria and Niza, Haratischwili moves into the late Soviet and post-Soviet era, where collapse does not produce simple renewal. Instead, the younger generations inherit a confusing mix of possibility, fra...
From The Eighth Life (For Brilka)
About Nino Haratischwili
Nino Haratischwili was born in 1983 in Tbilisi, Georgia, and has lived in Germany since 2003. She is a novelist, playwright, and director whose works have received numerous awards, including the Leipzig Book Fair Prize and the Schiller Memorial Prize. Writing in German, she is regarded as one of the...
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Nino Haratischwili was born in 1983 in Tbilisi, Georgia, and has lived in Germany since 2003. She is a novelist, playwright, and director whose works have received numerous awards, including the Leipzig Book Fair Prize and the Schiller Memorial Prize. Writing in German, she is regarded as one of the...
Nino Haratischwili was born in 1983 in Tbilisi, Georgia, and has lived in Germany since 2003. She is a novelist, playwright, and director whose works have received numerous awards, including the Leipzig Book Fair Prize and the Schiller Memorial Prize. Writing in German, she is regarded as one of the most significant voices in contemporary German-language literature.
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Nino Haratischwili was born in 1983 in Tbilisi, Georgia, and has lived in Germany since 2003. She is a novelist, playwright, and director whose works have received numerous awards, including the Leipzig Book Fair Prize and the Schiller Memorial Prize.
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