There are books about Georgia, and then there are books that make you feel what it’s like to be Georgian. Nino Haratischvili’s “The Eighth Life” belongs firmly in the second category.

First published in German in 2014 as “Das achte Leben (Für Brilka)”, the novel was Haratischvili’s international breakthrough as a prize winning bestseller. It is one of the rare works of fiction that has done more to introduce Georgia to the general reader than most guidebooks and wine columns combined. Which is exactly why it sits on our Books page, and why we keep coming back to it.

The story centers around Niza, the narrator, as she sits down to tell her niece Brilka the truth about their family. What unfolds is a century of Georgian history through the eyes of the Jaschi family, beginning with Stasia, daughter of a famous Tbilisi chocolatier, whose hot chocolate recipe travels down the generations like an heirloom no one can refuse and no one escapes. From the Russian Revolution and Georgia’s brief, bright independence, through the Soviet invasion, the terror of the 1930s, the Second World War, the long freeze, the street protests, the civil chaos of the 1990s, and on toward the Rose Revolution, the family carries its recipe, its ghosts, and its wounds. Six romances, one revolution.

Haratischvili, a Tbilisi-born playwright who writes in German and who left Georgia as a child in the difficult years after independence, refuses to let history become abstraction. Georgia’s twentieth century was not a backdrop for her characters. It was the weather they lived in. And yes, there is wine in that explanation.

A supra, the Georgian feast, is not just a party. It is a tradition of survival. A table, a toastmaker, and stories told so that the people at the table know who they are and what they have survived. When the country lost its independence, the supra kept it. 

Saperavi Brothers exists to support Georgians, and we mean that concretely. We import the wines of small, independent producers, families in Kakheti and beyond who farm their own vines and make wine that speaks for their villages. We keep a shelf of Georgian books, films, and art because a culture introduced only through its exports is a culture flattened. We lead trips to Georgia so that winemakers meet the people who drink their wine there. We throw Wild (y) East events, our traveling caravan of Georgian wine and food, because the fastest way to understand a wine culture is to sit inside it for an evening.

The supra, as always, continues.