The Ninth Life of Louis Drax - Tapa dura

'Jensen is becoming one of our best writers, sometimes surreal, sometimes down to earth, always with a great and embracing human sympathy.' Mail on Sunday 'One of the few living writers who can be described as genuinely original.' Matt Thorne 'Ambitious, mischievous, clever and very funny.' Time Out 'Liz Jensen has written a remarkable suspense novel: tart, mysterious and wrenching.' Anthony Minghella

Nine-year-old Louis Drax is a problem child: bright, precocious, deceitful, and dangerously, disturbingly, accident prone. When he falls off a cliff into a ravine, the accident seems almost predestined. The boy miraculously survives - but the family has been shattered. Louis' father has vanished, his mother is paralysed by shock, and Louis lies in a deep coma from which he may never emerge. In a clinic in Provence, Dr Pascal Dannachet tries to coax Louis back to consciousness. But the boy defies medical logic, startling Pascal Dannachet out of his safe preconceptions, and drawing him inexorably into the dark heart of Louis' buried world. Only Louis holds the key to the mystery surrounding his fall - and he can't communicate. Or can he? Shocking, poignant, heartbreaking, this is Jensen writing at her absolute best.