Again and Again
A Novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
From one of America’s greatest, most creative novelists comes Again and Again, a poignant and endlessly surprising story about love lost, found, and redeemed
Eugene “Geno” Miles is living out his final days in a nursing home, bored, curmudgeonly, and struggling to connect with his new nursing assistant, Angel, who is understandably skeptical of Geno’s insistence on having lived not just one life but many—all the way back to medieval Spain, where, as a petty thief, he first lucked upon true love only to lose it, and spend the next thousand years trying to recapture it.
Who is Geno? A lonely old man clinging to his delusions and rehearsing his fantasies, or a legitimate anomaly, a thousand-year-old man who continues to search for the love he lost so long ago?
As Angel comes to learn the truth about Geno, so, too, does the reader, and as his miraculous story comes to a head, so does the biggest truth of all: that love—timeless, often elusive—is sometimes right in front of us.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Evison (Lawn Boy) crafts a touching fantastical tale of a lonely elderly man's past reincarnations. Eugene Miles, 105, lives in a California elder care facility, where he hopes to die for good, fearing he'll lead yet another life of thwarted love if he's born again. As a poor thief named Euric in Moorish Spain, he fell in love with a woman named Gaya, who saved his life after he was caught stealing, but they were separated under dramatic and tragic circumstances that Evison gradually doles out. First, though, the reader learns of Eugene's other lives, including a turn as Oscar Wilde's cat, when he believed Wilde was Gaya reincarnated. Each time the protagonist is reunited with a new version of Gaya, he ends up alone, such as when Wilde is imprisoned for indecency. As Eugene, he's decided to close himself off from others. One day, however, Eugene meets a new nursing assistant named Angel, a young man who quickly disarms Eugene's rough demeanor. Every day afterward, he tells Angel about his past lives under the gaze of Wayne, the residence's mental health professional, who's convinced Eugene's stories are delusions. Though the ending feels unresolved, Evison evokes genuine emotions from the connection between cheery Angel and sour Eugene, and he keeps readers wondering whether Eugene is a misunderstood hero or an unreliable narrator. This touches the heart.
