Book Review: The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North

A friend recommended this book a while back during some part-time random coding stint. At first, I was a bit skeptical about reading this book as I had quite alot of literature to go through. Eventually I did come around to reading this book and boy, was it a thrill.

I like the premise of the book: dying and reliving your life again.

It says that there are people, living among us, who do not die. It says that they are born, and they die and they live again, the same life, a thousand times. And these people, being as they are infinitely old and infinitely wise …

At first, I felt that the book was a bit slow but it’s understandable; writing about the same lifetime again and again is no small joke. The concept of being able to relive your life again and again was a total mind boggling thing to me. Being able to gain experience from your past experiences and knowing future events is fascinating!

I felt that the whole concept of the “kalachakra” and their existence introduced a weird paradox that the author did not fully address. If your death brings you back to the time you were born, does that mean your previous life was imaginary or in a parallel universe or something else altogether?

All in all, I enjoyed the book. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August is not perfect, by any means, but whatever a lifetime is for, there are worse ways to spend a few hours of it with this weirdly interesting book.