The Ninth Life of Louis Drax

by Liz Jensen

Overview

Louis Drax is a boy like no other. He is brilliant and strange, and every year something violent seems to happen to him. On his ninth birthday, Louis goes on a picnic with his parents and falls off a cliff. The details are shrouded in mystery. Louis's mother is shell-shocked; his father has vanished. And after some confusion Louis himself, miraculously alive but deep in a coma, arrives at Dr. Pascal Dannachet's celebrated coma clinic...Full of astonishing twists and turns, this is a masterful tale of the secrets the human mind can hide.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781596918153
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	12/17/2008
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	397 KB

About the Author

Liz Jensen is the acclaimed author of four other novels, most recently War Crimes for the Home. She lives in London.
Liz Jensen is the bestselling author of eight acclaimed novels, including the Guardian-shortlisted Ark Baby, War Crimes for the Home, The Ninth Life of Louis Drax, The Rapture, shortlisted for the Brit Writers' Awards and selected as a Channel 4 TV Book Club Best Read, and, most recently, The Uninvited. She has been nominated three times for the Orange Prize for Fiction and her work has been published in more than twenty countries. Liz Jensen lives in Wimbledon, London.

Editorial Reviews

For everybody who thought they'd never see another novel like The Lovely Bones, a neurologist in Provence struggles to get a comatose nine-year-old to tell what put him into a persistent vegetative state. Precociously acerbic Louis Drax has always been accident-prone. The Caesarian section that gave him birth nearly killed his mother. He's survived food poisoning, salmonella, tetanus, botulism, and meningitis. Louis's luck seems to run out on the day his estranged parents reunite long enough to take him to the Auvergne to celebrate his ninth birthday. Their picnic ends when Louis tumbles over a cliff and drowns in the river below while Pierre Drax runs away. But Louis hasn't really drowned, as an alert morgue attendant notices that night. For months after his return from the dead, Louis improves until a seizure sends him to the care of Dr. Pascal Dannachot, of the Clinique de l'Horizon, formerly l'Hopital des Incurables, and it's here that British novelist Jensen (Ark Baby, 1998, etc.), letting Louis and Dannachot take turns telling the story, heats things up. Dannachot's unorthodox therapies don't succeed in enticing Louis out of his coma, but his probe of Louis's last day releases a torrent of dark secrets about Pierre and Natalie Drax. And as Louis, who has no intention of returning to a world of bickering parents and mocking schoolmates, enjoys the balm of new friendship with Gustave, the spectral figure who welcomes him to his ninth life, the intimacy the unsuspecting doctor seeks with both his young patient and the boy's inconsolable mother turns toxic. A series of letters ostensibly written by the comatose boy accuses Dannachot of designs on Natalie Drax and warns of diredevelopments-though few readers will imagine the calamities still to come. By turns disarmingly comical, absorbingly suspenseful, and finally shattering. Film rights to Miramax, to be adapted and directed by Anthony Minghella; Book-of-the-Month Club/Doubleday Book Club/Mystery Guild selection. Agent: Clare Alexander/Gillon Aitken Associates

Kirkus Reviews

Wonderfully strange . . . An affecting psychological novel about transgression and the mysteries of the subconscious.” —Four Stars, People

“The Ninth Life of Louis Drax packs an irresistibly twisted wallop . . . An exhilarating, darkly inventive read.” —Elle

“For everybody who thought they'd never see another novel like The Lovely Bones . . . By turns disarmingly comical, absorbingly suspenseful, and finally shattering.” —Starred Review, Kirkus Reviews

“A gripping and intelligent psychological thriller filled with crafty insights, black humor and grim twists . . . Fresh and original.” —Miami Herald

From the Publisher

"Try putting down a book that begins: 'I'm not most kids. I'm Louis Drax. Stuff happens to me that shouldn't happen, like going on a picnic where you drown.'…Wonderfully strange…an affecting psychological novel about transgression and the mysteries of the subconscious."

People (four stars)

"A gripping and intelligent psychological thriller filled with crafty insights, black humor and grim twists…Fresh and original."

Miami Herald

"Liz Jensen has written a remarkable suspense novel: tart, mysterious and wrenching."

Anthony Minghella

"The Ninth Life of Louis Drax packs an irresistibly twisted wallop…An exhilarating, darkly inventive read."

Elle