The Eighth Life

A six-generation family saga anchored in Tbilisi, where a chocolate-maker's secret recipe carries a curse down the century. The map holds the old town below Narikala, the grand houses of Sololaki at the foot of Mtatsminda, and the parade of Rustaveli Avenue through the Soviet years. The story ranges far, to Petrograd, Moscow, London and Berlin, but its heart stays in the Georgian capital.

Niza Jashi

The chocolate-maker's shop

Book I

The saga begins with a confectioner whose secret hot chocolate is so good it seems dangerous, a sweetness the narrator comes to read as a family curse. His shop belongs to the merchant lanes of the old town, where such trades clustered in the last years before the empire fell.

Book I (Stasia)

inferred The novel places the family's confectionery in the old town but gives no street; this marks a representative point on Kote Abkhazi Street, the historic commercial artery of Old Tbilisi, once called Leselidze.

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