Ten Lives

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.