My Nine Lives
by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

• New Hampshire State Library, Concord, USA
  

Publisher of Nominated Edition
Shoemaker & Hoard Publishers
ISBN 1593760280

For her first novel in more than nine years, in a career of distinctive and unique accomplishments, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has written a most unusual book. My Nine Lives are "Chapters of a Possible Past," as the subtitle declares. It is, as the author has commented, a book 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. Each 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 Theatre.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was born of Polish parents in Germany, then moved with her family to London at the time of Hitler's rise to power. She is the author of twelve novels, including Heat and Dust, which won the Booker Prize. She is a MacArthur Fellow and has been honoured with an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has written many screenplays for Merchant-Ivory Productions, two of them earning Academy Awards (A Room with a View and Howard's End). Jhabvala divides her time between Delhi and New York.