NINE LIVES
A novel by Paul Smith
He was just a boy when it started - beaten at home, hunted at school, wired for survival.
Bosnia showed him what men become when the rules disappear.
Northern Ireland showed him how quietly killing can be done - inside The Det, a deniable special forces unit set up to carry out jobs that could never be acknowledged. No paperwork. No cover. If it went wrong, you were denied. If it went right, it never happened.
When the uniform came off, the spooks picked him up and moved him on - Afghanistan, Iraq - mercenary contracts where money flowed, rules didn't exist, and the damage went deeper.
By twenty-three, he'd lost count of the bodies - and stopped feeling anything at all.
But the fighting followed him home.
From warzones to the Manchester ganglands, the places changed but the pattern stayed the same: violence, survival, and another piece of himself gone.
He should have died nine times - bullets, bombs, fire, his own hand.
War didn't just teach him how to kill.
It taught him how to switch everything else off.
Until one girl reaches into the wreckage -
and saves him from losing his last life.
Cold. Honest. Uncomfortable to read. Relentlessly British.
Nine Lives isn't just about war - it's about what war makes of men, and what's left when the killing stops.
Part war story. Part psychological thriller.
And all of it feels too real to be fiction.
ï½ï½ï½ï½ For readers who know the war doesn't end when the fighting stops.
Industry Reviews
Booklife Review:
Smith holds nothing back in this brutal but empathetic debut centered on one British soldier/mercenary/special operative cheating death and facing relentless violence as the bodies pile up and he's repeatedly broken down. The action starts strongly, in media res, as our protagonist reflects on his first kill, how many followed that, and how he should by rights be dead himself. His name and exact backstory-beyond an abusive childhood, a "soft spot for dogs," an ex he doesn't want to see, and his military training-are both a mystery and, perhaps, somewhat beside the point, as he declares himself "the thing they trained me to be." In narration, he is stoic, apathetic, hiding a whirlpool of emotions, though with each wrenching experience he recounts he comes close to death. His life, like one of his international missions, is about "survival-hour by hour-doing whatever it took and justifying none of it to anybody."
Supporting UN humanitarian aid convoys in Bosnia eventually leads to a secret position within the British Army. He is given the title Number 16 and put through grueling training. In crisp and convincing prose, each chapter reports cruelty and atrocities or the verbal abuse and intimidation that strip soldiers down and foster their compliance-soldiers are ordered to make out or beat each other up. Eventually, recruited into the Det, he is sent off to the desert wars.
Deftly, with urgent detail and a clear sense of the heart that aches beneath the wounds, Smith highlights how all war comes to feel the same to the protagonist: "different flags, different names, same blueprint." Violence and murder have become a reflex, and he can kill without batting an eye. The novel by design becomes an endurance test, exploring how much the reader or this soldier can take. Fortunately, Smith builds to heartening moments of connection as this soldier faces life after service; the final scenes, a muted celebration of everyday living, offer welcome relief.
Takeaway: Wrenching, introspective military tale of surviving-and moving on.
