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Juja

Juja

by Nino Haratischvili

Translated by Ruth Martin

Published by: Scribe Publications Pty Ltd

Imprint: Scribe US

288 Pages, 5.10 x 7.80 in

Paperback
9781957363677
Published: May 2024

$18.00

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Description
Authors
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The sweeping debut novel set in bohemian Paris, by the author of international bestseller The Eighth Life.

In 1953, a teenage girl, Jeanne Saré, 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 It is hastily withdrawn from sale and eventually forgotten about.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 Saré’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 Saré’s, often with devastating results, but the truth about her may be even stranger than the fictions they have invented.

Nino Haratischvili was born in Georgia in 1983, and is an award-winning novelist, playwright, and theater director. At home in two different worlds, each with their own language, she has been writing in both German and Georgian since the age of twelve. In 2010, her debut novel, Juja, was nominated for the German Book Prize, as was Die Katze und der General in 2018. Her third novel, The Eighth Life, has been translated into many languages and is an international bestseller. It won the Anna Seghers Prize, the Lessing Prize Stipend, and the Bertolt Brecht Prize, and was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2020. She lives in Berlin.

Ruth Martin studied English literature before gaining a PhD in German. She has been translating fiction and nonfiction books since 2010, by authors ranging from Joseph Roth and Hannah Arendt to Volker Weidermann and Shida Bazyar. She has taught translation at the University of Kent and the Bristol Translates summer school, and is a former co-chair of the Society of Authors Translators Association.

“Haratischvili's lyrical prose and mastery of tone shine … Her mosaic of broken souls and elusive mystery offer many rewards for patient readers, culminating in a provocative statement on art's capacity to both shatter and redeem.”

—Chris Reed, NZ Booklovers

“You can see in this novel the fledgling novelist testing the reader and I can see her magnificent book Eighth Life emerging from the embers of Juja.”

— Rosalind Ephraim, Burway Books

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

Praise for The Eighth Life:

“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

Praise for My Soul Twin:

“A passionate novel.”

—Matthew Janney, The Guardian

“The novel’s sexual voltage buoys you through its twists and turns.”

—Anthony Cummins, The Observer

Juja

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