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Published Nov 2023
336 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
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.
"A touching fantastical tale…Evison evokes genuine emotions…This touches the heart." —Publishers Weekly
"In prior novels like The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving (2012) and This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! (2015), Evison demonstrated deep compassion toward hard-luck cases, the elderly, and the unwell. That's just as true here; true or not, Eugene's efforts to slay his past demons is affecting. But that plotline is subsumed by some cloying prose...Emotionally robust but structurally cumbersome." —Kirkus Reviews
"Tender and delightful...Evison imbues his big-hearted narrative with sumptuous mystery and intrigue tracing Eugene's quest for love amid undiminished hope." —Booklist
"Jonathan Evison's latest is one of those rare, captivating books that you can't help but be drawn into. This outstanding tale of tales had me turning pages long after dark and kept me delightfully off-kilter all the way to the end. A gorgeous story about love, loss, and eternal hope." —Shelby Van Pelt, New York Times bestselling author of Remarkably Bright Creatures
"Evison's dazzling new novel does what the best literature does, pulls us out of our lives and plunges us into another—in this case many others—and it does it in a way that is truly, mindbendingly, genius. A stunning Scherazade-told tale about the only subject that matters—love—Again and Again is about the stories we tell ourselves to create ourselves, the stories we believe, and the way a human heart can shatter and still find a kind of wholeness. To say I loved this book is an understatement." —Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of Pictures of You and With or Without You
"A beguiling and big-hearted literary page-turner, Again and Again brims with narrative brio while also partaking in a poignant, timeless wisdom. Eugene's voice enchanted me from the first page and wove its way into the fibers of my being, even and especially when I felt him start to tug at the rug under my feet." —Antoine Wilson, author of Mouth to Mouth and Panorama City
This information about Again and Again was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Algonquin Books
Jonathan Evison is the author of the novels All About Lulu, West of Here, The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving, This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance!, Lawn Boy, and Legends of the North Cascades. He lives with his wife and family in Washington State.
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