#booklog: The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

Living one life seems like a bit of a slog sometimes already. Living fifteen? Unimaginable!

But that's what Claire North's protagonist, one Harry August, describes having to live through in her aptly named novel.

It's a book I'd, like so many others, started a while ago but hadn't managed to really dig into. I finally got around to it a couple of weeks ago.

The premise is intriguing: a man lives until he doesn't, then finds out he's got to do the same thing all over again. Same birthplace, same depressing upbringing as a bastard child, same kind of death. But this time around, the memory of the first life comes back at around age three.

It takes him until life three or four to realise he's part of a special kind of breed who are destined to keep reliving their lives, with memories of their past ones intact.

Claire North (a pseudonym of author Catherine Webb), does a very convincing job describing the turmoil you can imagine this might induce, and then the ways lives unfold once Harry realises what's going on.

It's a high concept I'm quite enamoured with, and as it is with high concepts, I usually find that the possibilities they open up aren't explored as much as I'd like (before moving on to whatever might endanger the concept). North, I'm happy to say, seems to share this anxiety and gives me exactly what I was looking for.

Of course she does move on to give us the kind of conflict - and a nemesis - a story like that demands, and it's a good one, but I probably could have done with more of the same for another 300 or so pages.

It's quite a masterful novel and there's good reason it's won all sorts of awards.

One thing I wish it was: part of a series. Because I wish I could dive right back in.