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You are here: Home > Blog > In the Media > The best science fiction novels published in June – review roundup
The best science fiction novels published in June – review roundup
Claire North's The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, Nnedi Okorafor's Lagoon, James Lovegrove's Age of Shiva, Neil Williamson's The Moon King and Sarah Lotz's The Three

From first line to beautiful denouement, Claire North's The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (Orbit, £12.99) is a gripping read that is often quietly profound, emotionally affecting and intellectually dizzying. Harry August is fated to live his life again and again, a kind of identical reincarnation, born to the same parents, in the same body, but with memories of his previous lives intact.

As he lies dying at the end of his 11th life he is visited by a seven-year-old girl with a message from thousands of years in the future that he must deliver to the Cronus Club: "The world is ending." The members of the Cronus Club are, like Harry, men and women who live their lives over and over. When, in his next incarnation, Harry duly delivers the message, he is told that there is no hope of effecting change.

What follows is Harry's investigations into the eventual apocalypse, and his fateful involvement with his friend Victor, a "fellow traveller" intent on accelerating the world's technological progress for his own ends … As might be expected from such a narrative, the novel is an examination of determinism and free will, but also a subtle study of friendship, love and the fluid complexity of existence.

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Source: The Guardian