My Nine Lives

A boy from an Armenian family doesn’t always live in sunshine—there are dark spots in his life, strange and dangerous events. Mountains, travel, fights, scandalous pranks coexist with the purest childhood love, warmth from grandparents, strong friendship, and that feeling of the taste, light, and scent of life that we experience only in childhood. And then the boy grows older: the fog comes down on memory, and the magical Country of Childhood drifts far away, opening up new horizons for the grown young man. “Nine Lives” is an expanded and edited version of the collection “Matani,” which received a special nomination for the “Electronic Letter” award in 2020. The book is based on diary entries divided into 9 chapters, and each chapter is lived through by the hero as a separate life. In the novel, we will see the path from boyhood to adulthood—from a young boy to a grown man tested by the Big City, a return to his homeland, and the Spitak earthquake, an event that in 1988 split the life of an entire country into “before” and “after.”