The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

Harry is born at a railway station, the result of an affair between a landowner and a kitchen maid, and is raised by the estate's groundskeeper and his wife. In his first life he lives quietly and dies of illness. In his second, horrified to wake up as a child again, he struggles badly. Gradually he learns that he belongs to a small, secret group of people who are reborn into their own lives, and that some of them have formed a society, the Cronus Club, which helps members through each childhood and passes messages across generations.

The warning that reaches Harry in his eleventh life suggests that someone is changing history to speed up technology, with disastrous results. His search leads to Vincent Rankis, a charismatic scientist he once counted as a friend, who is trying to build a device to understand the universe. The novel jumps between Harry's lives, wars and decades, from Cold War spying to a lonely life as a scientist, and builds to a tense, patient battle of wits. North writes with dry humor and real sadness about what it means to remember everything when no one else can.

Intricate but very readable. About 432 pages in the US paperback edition.