I'm going to nominate something outside my usual reading genres, but I enjoyed the writing style of the sample that I read and found the concept intriguing.
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North. Winner of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Novel (2015) and Arthur C. Clarke Award Nominee for Best Novel (2015). Claire North is the pseudonym for Catherine Webb, a Carnegie Medal-nominated, young-adult novelist. It seems to be overlapping genres of science fiction, history and even spy thriller.
Available at
Amazon US and
Kobo US for $9.99. I did check that it is available as an ebook in Australia, Canada and UK. It is also available at
Overdrive, Cloud (previously 3M) and Axis 360 Libraries. It can be found at Scribd as an audiobook.
Because the Goodreads description is rather vague, I've copied a starred review from Booklist instead.
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Harry August isn’t human. Well, that’s not quite accurate. He is human but a different sort of human from the rest of us: he was born (in the ladies’ washroom of a train station in England in 1919), he lives a certain number of years, and he dies—and then he’s born again, right back where he started, and a handful of years later his memories of his first life return. Harry is, like a few others, a kalachakra, an immortal who is constantly reborn, each time with all the memories of his previous lives. This wonderful novel, narrated by Harry, ranges back and forth in time as he recounts episodes from his various lives, but it’s all held together by a compelling mystery involving nothing less than the end of the world itself (a thousand years in the future).
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From Wikipedia:
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The Wheel of time or wheel of history (also known as Kalachakra) is a concept found in several religious traditions and philosophies, notably religions of Indian origin such as Hinduism, Sikhism, and Buddhism, which regard time as cyclical and consisting of repeating ages. Many other cultures contain belief in a similar concept: notably, the Q'ero Indians in Peru, as well as the Hopi Indians of Arizona.
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