The Ninth Circle

'It’s Cara, yes? Please, make yourself comfortable.' So begins the relationship between psychotherapist Rachel Frieling and her new patient, Cara Dimanovska, an intellectually brilliant twenty-five-year-old who, having abandoned her doctoral studies on the philosopher and religious thinker Simone Weil, has recently attempted suicide. The life story that Cara slowly reveals to her therapist has been shaped by violence and loss, and by an increasingly desperate struggle to make sense of her suffering in a purely intellectual way. As her initial hostility towards her therapist gives way to intimacy and trust, prompted in part by the revelation that Rachel, too, has suffered traumatizing loss, Cara convinces herself that she has managed to reconnect with her long-buried true self. That belief is reinforced when she meets Zaid, a man who seems to offer her hope of a new life. Her therapist sees things differently, however, and tries to warn Cara that she is still at risk of relapsing into her former self-hatred. For both therapist and patient, the challenge becomes how to navigate a way forward through their shared experiences of suffering.