Claire North, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August imagines a world in which a small percentage of the population are ouroborans or kalachakra—individuals who loop through time, reliving their lives indefinitely against a familiar historical backdrop.

The big events don't change—at least, they're not supposed to—but the details of any specific life are what the individual makes it: you're born to the same parents, in the same place, but can choose a different career, a different spouse, a different college.

The premise sets one thinking, and questions remain: as one Amazon reviewer noted, it's not clear what happens when one ouroboran dies. He goes back to his year of birth, but how does that timeline affect the others so afflicted?

There is a villain in this book, with an Evil Scheme worthy of capital letters, but it's not entirely clear exactly what that scheme is. We know it's bad, but the details are sketchy.

My only other complaint is that the book is longer than it needs to be. It's a richly imagined world, and that imagining takes time and pages, but still, there were whole chapters that probably could have been lopped off without losing anything.

At any rate, I don't want to dwell on these complaints, because I enjoyed the book quite a lot and found myself reading for long stretches when I should have been sleeping. It also brought back fond memories of Ken Grimwood's Replay, which has a similar theme and is highly recommended.