What is the title of this book?

January 4, 2022 3:21 PM

Hi, there was a science fiction book that I had read when I was younger that I want to read again and cannot for the life of me recall the title and my Google-Fu fails me as well. It is a book about a man and a woman who die and are reborn as their younger selves, but retain memory of their previous lives. They keep coming back to be with each other after each incarnation, but in one of the incarnations, he is born as an adult, but she is born as a minor.

Though they have been with each other in past lives, they have to wait until she becomes an adult before they can get back together again as her parents are not about to allow their daughter to be with a strange grown man. He becomes an author and writes a book about mandelas(?) and makes movies about whales in some of his incarnations.

Does this ring a bell?

posted by apark to Media & Arts (9 answers total)

Is it Replay, by Ken Grimwood?
posted by inkyz at 3:30 PM on January 4, 2022

If you want more books with a similar sort of gimmick, try "The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August" by Claire North or "The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle" by Stuart Turton.
posted by It's Never Lurgi at 3:59 PM on January 4, 2022

Are you thinking of The Time-Traveller's Wife? (It's not reincarnation exactly.)
posted by Countess Sandwich at 4:07 PM on January 4, 2022

Some parts of that sound like The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson, but my memory is fuzzy on the details.
posted by xris at 4:11 PM on January 4, 2022

It's definitely Replay. The only part I couldn't recall was Pamela being a minor, but I just grabbed the book off the shelf, and that's chapter 13. When Jeff first meets Pamela, she's a filmmaker, and in Into The Deep, the semi-sequel Grimwood wrote, there are dolphins (and maybe whales), and the actual book is the telling of the fictional movie that Replay's Pamela produced.
posted by The Wrong Kind of Cheese at 4:13 PM on January 4, 2022

Ding, ding, ding. @inkyz has the answer. That's it, thank you! It indeed is "Replay" by Ken Grimwood.
posted by apark at 5:35 PM on January 4, 2022

Also many thanks to everyone who contributed answers. (and @The Wrong Kind of Cheese who also got "Replay"!)
posted by apark at 5:45 PM on January 4, 2022

If you want more books with a similar sort of gimmick, try "The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August" by Claire North or "The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle" by Stuart Turton.

Yesssss they are both very satisfying!!!
posted by charmedimsure at 10:30 PM on January 4, 2022

y'might enjoy The Brushwood Boy by Kipling, I did
posted by BobTheScientist at 12:26 AM on January 5, 2022