Ancient Logic

This was not the book I intended to read first after finishing Peripheral. But I knew within the first five pages that I would be reading this from cover to cover before I read anything else. That’s the power of a good book, of an arresting story. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North (the now uncovered pseudonym of YA author Catherine Web) is that.  The simple idea behind the novel, a tweak of the Groundhog Day, is that certain individuals, called Kalachakra , are reincarnated into their own lives existence after existence, living the same span of time from infancy to death again and again. Harry August, for example is always born in 1919, spends his routinely traumatic childhood in Northern England, before winding up dying some time around the fall of the Berlin Wall. In different hands I think this novel could have easily been basically  contemporary fiction. Recall the Time Traveller’s Wife as an example of modern literature’s increasing appropri...