The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
by Claire North
read by Peter Kenny

My rating: 4 / 5
Genre: Speculative fiction

When a little girl visits Harry August on his deathbed and tells him that the world is ending, he takes the message with him to the grave…and then into his next life. Harry is one of a small number of people who live their lives over and over again—dying only to be born again in the same place and time as their previous lives. Harry never sees the future, but the dire message has been passed back from the future, and now it’s up to Harry to do something about it.

This book is going to be difficult to review. I’ll say up front that I enjoyed it, even while being a little uncertain about what was going on for much of it. Now I’ll go into more detail about my journey with this book: My husband got the audiobook for me a while back, thinking it was something that would interest me, but it took me a while to get to it, mostly because the synopsis is fairly vague and didn’t grab my attention more than the general question of how the whole “multiple lives” thing works. When I started listening to it recently, I appreciated that the author starts with a decent hook, that being the little girl telling Harry on his deathbed that the world is ending, the end is coming faster, and that it’s up to him to do something. But then it hits the brakes from there to give us Harry’s backstory, and the pace is quite slow for a while. The thing is though…I don’t really remember ever being bored. And I think that’s because the author intersperses information about some of Harry’s later lives, even while talking about his first life, which is the one before he found out that he was going to go on to live multiple lives, and thus the “boring” one.

I labeled this novel as speculative fiction, and I think that actually fits more than one way. It’s certainly some kind of fantasy or sci-fi that sets up the world in which some people live their lives over and over again. But the plot itself is basically full of speculation about how a person might spend their time if they did live their life over and over again. For the longest time, I wasn’t really sure what the main plot or conflict was going to turn out to be, but even as I waited for it to develop, I didn’t mind the meandering. Then when it showed up, I was completely hooked for the rest of the book. Though even then, it slowed down a bit after that. Even then, the author would still pause the narrative for a moment to jump to a different time in Harry’s timeline—sometimes that would feel a little jarring, but most of the time, I appreciated the connection the author was making. The ending was completely satisfying, except I was left with just one question, which would be a spoiler to include. (If you’re curious enough to know what my question is, check out my review on Goodreads, where I could put it behind a spoiler tag.)

I worry that my review might be a little confusing, but it’s probably fitting, considering the nature of this book. Overall, I will just say that I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I should as I listened. My main complaint is the major slow-downs along the way here and there, plus there was some unnecessary political commentary. The narrator, Peter Kenny, is pretty amazing and a great choice for this book, considering that Harry’s lives take him all over the world, so there are quite a few different accents incorporated. This is the kind of book that I fully intend to listen to again some time, because knowing more about Harry’s situation and the worldbuilding, I’ll probably catch more in the details early on. Since it’s difficult to explain what the book is about and what kind of genre(s) it fits into, it’s difficult to know who to recommend it to. I will say, though, that it reminded me a bit of The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, at least in the mechanics of the worldbuilding, so there would probably be a crossover in fans there. Outside of that, if you have any interest in the book after reading my review (or before reading it), I do recommend it.

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