My Nine Lives: Chapters of a Possible Past

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala is a novelist of unequalled insight, grace, and emotional power. My Nine Lives, her first novel in more than nine years, is filled with "invented memories." Nine vignettes -- autobiographical fictions -- are linked to portray a rich life, filled with searching, from London to Delhi, from Hollywood to New York. sEach chapter gathers a different cast of characters, some new and some vaguely familiar, and the linked assembly is as exciting and illuminating as an artist's first show at a Chelsea gallery or a new play at the Studio Theater. After seventeen books, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala takes on as her subject herself, the life she may have or may have wished to live. My Nine Lives is a startling and intriguing book of invention and memory.