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Ten Lives
  • Published: 12 December 2026
  • ISBN: 9781847927200
  • Imprint: Bodley Head
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $70.00

Ten Lives

How What We Have Shapes Who We Are

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EBook
12 Nov 2026
Hardback
12 Dec 2026
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A revelatory exploration of the ways in which wealth – and the lack of it – shapes our lives, told through the stories of ten people, from award-winning data journalist and artist Mona Chalabi.

Anna has a comfortable life in a beautiful house thanks to her husband – until he suddenly asks for a divorce. Kristina faces a choice between raising her child and finishing her degree; growing other people’s babies afforded her a way out. Tiffany, meanwhile, earns so little that the farm which is her greatest source of reassurance is also her greatest source of stress. Then there’s Jacob: he earns vast sums in finance, and yet he’s less concerned with what he has than with what he has to lose.

Ten people, ten different incomes, all of them somehow afraid. For five years, data journalist Mona Chalabi followed their lives, documenting how wealth shaped their feelings, choices, identities and insecurities. Exposing our various delusions and our universal trappedness, her arresting account of what she discovered asks how much is actually enough to be – and feel – safe? And can we ever know how much we need, or what we owe one another, until we are more honest about what we have?

Interwoven with the data visualisations for which Chalabi is renowned, as well as her own dramatic journey through sudden wealth and back again, Ten Lives reveals, with disarming candour, what we try so hard to hide from one another. And it shows what we stand to gain from confronting the shame we share with its liberating antidote: the truth.
  • Published: 12 December 2026
  • ISBN: 9781847927200
  • Imprint: Bodley Head
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $70.00
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About the author

Mona Chalabi

Mona Chalabi is an award-winning writer and illustrator. Her work has earned her a Pulitzer Prize, honorary fellowships at the British Science Association and the Royal Society for the Arts, an Emmy nomination, and recognition from the Royal Statistical Society. In recent years, her art has been exhibited at the Tate, the Smithsonian Design Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum. Her writing and illustrations have been featured in the Guardian, New Yorker and New York Review of Books.
MC

Praise for Ten Lives

This book explores how deeply relevant inequality is - how it moulds our minds and bends our moralities. It's the most vivid and readable exploration of the wealth gap I’ve ever read. Anyone who cares about a better future should read this

BRIAN ENO

An astonishing book. Chalabi’s taboo-busting transparency about peoples’ financial lives is revolutionary enough. But it’s the pellucid clarity of her data visualizations that will really change how you see things. I was riveted from start to finish

ALISON BECHDEL

This [is a] brilliant, essential and riveting book, which I guarantee will be like nothing else you have read

Bookseller

I lapped Ten Lives up in two sittings. Mona Chalabi’s writing is captivating, and her data illustrations are both beautiful and demystifying. A fascinating, compelling read

KATHY BURKE

Mona Chalabi transforms raw data into a deeply human tapestry. Ten Lives is a fresh, creative and extraordinarily moving unpicking of our relationship with money. It cuts through the shame and silence surrounding class, income and wealth to deliver a clarion call for honesty and connection

KATE PICKETT, author of The Good Society

Mona Chalabi reveals with frank, engaging precision what we're all really wondering about. Utterly satisfying, informative and funny

LIANA FINCK, author of Let There Be Light

Chalabi has a rare ability to tease out the human stories buried within data to illuminate uncomfortable societal truths

TESSA HULLS, author of Feeding Ghosts

Mona Chalabi turns economic analysis into gripping human drama. Eye-opening, infuriating and visually sumptuous

LAUREN REDNISS, author of Oak Flat

A perfect combination of human stories with visualizations of the data that rules all our lives. Our ability to imagine is shaped by these numbers

DAVID BYRNE

An exploration of wealth, class and ever-widening income inequality [from] the Pulitzer-prize-winning data journalist and illustrator – known for her ability to translate dry statistics into simple visuals that elucidate societal realities with thunderbolt clarity

Vogue