My Nine Lives: Chapters of a Possible Past
by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
John Murray $220
Most of us can remember misspending at least part of our youth dreaming up alternative identities for ourselves - richer parents, cooler siblings, a more exotic home.
For her first novel in nine years, Booker Prize winner Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has set out to re-examine this childish fantasy by granting herself different lives. In nine pieces of 'potentially autobiographical' fiction, set in India, New York and London, she takes on herself as her subject and rewrites her past to explore paths her life could have followed.
Born in Germany in 1927 of Jewish-Polish parents, Jhabvala emigrated to England in 1939. She was educated in London, and in 1951 married an Indian architect. She has lived in Delhi, New York and London, completing 17 novels and several film scripts for Merchant Ivory.
Her fictionalised self is usually a writer or actress, and the only child of a beautiful, vain mother and wealthy German-Jewish father who fled the Nazis. Her spiritual quest often leads to India, where she finds a lover she happens to meet on a bus or in a park. A menage a trois features in nearly every story, as does a man who willingly raises another man's child as his own.