The Ninth Life of Louis Drax

By Liz Jensen

NOW A MAJOR FILM STARRING JAMIE DORNAN AND AARON PAUL

Nine-year-old Louis Drax is a problem child: bright, precocious, deceitful – and dangerously, disturbingly, disaster-prone. When he falls off a cliff into a ravine, the accident seems almost predestined. Louis 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 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?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Jun 7, 2010
• ISBN: 9781408813584

Liz Jensen

Liz Jensen is the bestselling author of eight acclaimed novels, including the Guardian-shortlisted Ark Baby, War Crimes for the Home, The Ninth Life of Louis Drax, The Rapture, shortlisted for the Brit Writers' Awards and selected as a Channel 4 TV Book Club Best Read, and, most recently, The Uninvited. She has been nominated three times for the Orange Prize for Fiction and her work has been published in more than twenty countries. Liz Jensen lives in Wimbledon, London. www.lizjensen.com

Reviews for The Ninth Life of Louis Drax

[eadieb-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Book Description:Nine-year-old Louis Drax is a problem child: bright, precocious, deceitful, and dangerously accident-prone. When he falls off a cliff during a picnic, the accident seems almost predestined.Louis miraculously survives--but the family has been shattered. Louis' father has vanished, his mother is in shock, and Louis lies in a deep coma from which he may never emerge.In a renowned coma clinic, a specialist tries to coax Louis back to consciousness. But the boy defies medical logic, startling the doctor 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?My Review:This is a whimsical story about a 9 year old French boy who is accident prone and very unlucky with diseases. He is a bit odd and his friends have nicknamed him 'Wacko Boy'. Lots of twists and turns make the novel a page-turner. The characters are complex and the plot is very unusual. This dark, psychological thriller does have some humor and some supernatural aspects too. The book is very entertaining but very predictable. I look forward to reading more from this author and would highly recommend this book to those who would like to read something very unique.

[silentq_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Louis is a young boy prone to tragedy. He ends up falling off of a cliff at a picnic with his mother and father, and his father disappears. Louis is placed in a coma care facility run by a doctor trying to figure out how to wake up all of his patients. His mother is traumatised by the whole affair, and the doctor gets drawn into their lives. We get to hear things from the dream like perspective of Louis, filtered through his childish understanding. This was a neat book, lots of twists and turns and a bit of magical realism thrown in as well

[e5j · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I feel like I know people like this in real life. People who are always having BIG HUGE ISSUES and DRAMA and everyone should feel sorry for them all the time. That's part of the reason I don't get on FB anymore. I think that colored my opinion of the book but I really did like the writing.

[alfonso809 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

when is Louis Drax talking it gets a 5.

[isabelx_21 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I had forgotten it was her birthday because I was so excited about mine and getting Mohammed the Third. Papa reminded me on the phone and told me to make a card but I was doing a Lego model of a rocket-launcher plus space capsule and I forgot about the card so in the end I just signed Papa's when he came in his new car that's a Volkswagen Passat. I used black wax crayon, which is for vampire bats and death stuff and the swastika.What I really like about Liz Jensen is that all her books are entirely different. First I read "The Paper Eater", a dystopian science fiction story set on an island made out of rubbish, then "Ark Baby" which is a humorous historical fantasy, featuring ghosts and evolution, while "The Ninth Life of Louis Drax" is basically a psychological thriller about a little boy in a coma and the events which led to his accident. I'm sure that "War Crimes for the Home" which is also in my to be reads will turn out to be entirely different again.

[nicx27 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Louis Drax is a very accident prone boy. One day, during a picnic by a cliff with his mother and father, he plunges over the edge into a ravine and ends up in a coma. His mother is quite hysterical and his father has disappeared. Enter Dr Dannachet who works at a hospital that cares for people who are in comas.This is an intriguing book based on a clever idea. I wouldn't have thought of it as a psychological thriller, as one of the quotes on the back of the book proclaims, but I suppose it sort of fits into that category. I liked parts of it, but other parts I just found a little bit tedious. It's a short book and it didn't take me long to read, but it felt like a long time when I was reading parts of it.It's not the first of Liz Jensen's books that I have not fully engaged with, and so I think maybe she's not a writer for me. It's set in France, and has the slightly stilted feel of a translation, but it's not. Also, if you don't like a lack of speech marks then this isn't for you, as all it has is a dash to show somebody is speaking, but nothing to show that they have stopped.Fairly accomplished writing, but needs characters that the reader can engage with and relate to, and less rambling.

[taramatchi · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I can't wait for the movie to come out. This was really engaging and was somewhat disturbing at times, especially when it was written in the voice of Louis Drax, the amazing accident prone boy. It was really a neat mystery and I found that the story was really original and kept me reading until the end.

[wandering_star_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The Ninth Life of Louis Drax appears, at the beginning, to be about the boy of the title, an accident-prone nine-year-old. But as the book develops, it turns out to be more about the peripheral characters - and particularly young Louis' mother, a frail beauty who arouses pity in the various medical professionals who are looking after her son.Like Jensen's other books, this conceals serious and even disturbing subject matter under a veil of slightly wacky humour. This time, though, I found it much easier to predict the twists, and perhaps as a result the book was less moving or effective than other ones that I have read, such as "War Crimes For The Home".

[silvercowrie · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is quite a deep, dark, psychological book about nine year old Louis Drax, an unusual and brilliant boy who is in a coma following an accident. It is quite a strange and captivating tale.

[djupstrom · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book is one of the best adolescent literature books I have ever read!!

[bookheaven_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I listened to this book on tape and the voices were very well done.

[angharad_reads · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Well, certainly I thought this was well-enough written. I'd hoped for genre (whether fantasy or mystery) content to play a bigger role in the plot, and for the characters. I certainly didn't care about the romance, although I concede its foreshadowing/character value. Also, I guessed most of the "plot twists" early on. I just felt disappointed that, in fact, Louis wasn't a very unusual little boy after all. I have better hopes for "My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time" by the same author.But why on earth was this book set in France with French characters? I don't know enough about the French soul to assume that it was necessary to the action, let alone the ambience. In fact, I'm left with more than a whiff of Murakami (hint: not French): rueful, jaded, lovely, flawed, magically-realistic: people, land, sentences. (I would toss wabi-sabi in here, but that would just be prententious and confusing. Like the author?)