Ruth Prawer Jhabvala is a novelist of unequalled insight, grace and emotional power. My Nine Lives represents a new and fascinating strand in her outstanding output canon of work: as she puts it, the 'potentially autobiographical'. In this, her most personal book, she brilliantly explores nine possible lives. While each is located in deeply familiar territory: whether in England, India, or America, and often overlaid with that essential Central European family background, each life is born of startlingly different origins and each reveals a different destiny. Here are nine different answers to the central question: what would happen if I were granted an alternative life?