The First Fifteen Lives Of Harry August

Author: Claire North

What would you do if you could live your life over and over again? It may not be as idyllic an option as it sounds, as Claire North demonstrates in this gripping novel. There are among us, there have always been among us, people who, when they die, are born again at the exact same time and in the exact same circumstances as their original birth. Because they carry memories from their previous lives, they are usually able to bet on winning horses and so give themselves a comfortable life. And after one or two lifetimes they also tend to discover others like them, the so called Cronos Club, who provide a support network. But other than that, there are those who seek religion and those who live lives of debauchery, and those who basically live fairly ordinary lives. Then a message is passed back from the future, whispered by a child to a dying man, who in turn as a reborn child will whisper it at someone else's death bed: the end of the world is getting earlier. Thus Harry August discovers that there is someone who is trying to destroy the Cronos Club, and at the same time initiate so many technological developments that it changes the character of the world and accelerates the end of the world. The search, and the subsequent battle of wills with his opponent, takes several lifetimes. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August is a vivacious, endlessly inventive story that constantly makes us see our world afresh.

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Claire North's novel is one of a number of works recently that have presented numerous different versions of the same person, all of which deserve attention.

Alternative Choice
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson is the story of Ursula Todd who is born one snowy morning in February 1910 and instantly dies, or she dies in the influenza epidemic after the First World War, or she is killed by a brutal husband, or she bombed in the Blitz, or she dies a lonely death in the 1970s. At each death, the story is reset back to that snowy February, and Ursula takes a different path in life. She doesn't remember her other lives, but there is an awareness that helps her avoid repetitions of the same death. Her lives are mostly ordinary, a mid-level clerk, an ARP warden in the war, but they work constantly towards a course of events in which her beloved brother is not killed in the war. Written with humanity, compassion and a wonderful eye for detail, this is an extraordinary account of one woman's lives in the 20th century.

Alternative Choice
My Real Children by Jo Walton differs from Atkinson's novel by starting not at the beginning of life but at the end. Patricia Cowan is an old woman in a nursing home whose memories seem incoherent and contradictory. Then we flash back to a fateful phone call when her boyfriend called to ask her to marry him. If she said yes, she entered a troubled marriage in which she raises four children but is disappointed in life, but the world is more peaceful than our own; if she said no, she developed a passion for Italy, wrote best selling guide books, and had a long-lasting lesbian relationship, but the world was less peaceful and more threatening. In both lives, she faces limitations and restrictions simply because she is a woman, which is what makes this such an interesting book.