Again and Again

A Novel

By: Jonathan Evison

Narrated by: Robert Fass

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.

Enjoyable Love Story with Unreliable Narrator

**Spoiler Alert** I highly recommend this book! I haven’t enjoyed an unreliable narrator this much since Girl on a Train. In this case, I didn’t care if the protagonist’s stories were true or not because the novel’s emotional weight surpasses any need to untangle the truth. It’s a sweeping story of love and loss, with a tearful and deeply personal ending. It’s not a typical love story; it’s a dark exploration of the gut-wrenching damage of childhood trauma and the desperate human need to hold onto sanity. For all that, the novel offers a final hopeful truth, that love—if allowed—is a force strong enough to overcome the deepest scars.

Fantastical, tragic, epic-ish, and at the same time filled with humor.

This is a fascinating journey, that spans centuries, addresses the emptiness experience by many, if not most people from time to time.

Both believable and unbelievable, personal and at times heartrending, it is fundamentally an unconventional love story.

Despite what I’ve stated, it is not a heavy book, as it is filled with humor and absurdities.

It’s not perfect, ( no book is perfect), it is a marvelous read, which I highly recommend.

I never knew where this was going. It was very touching and I think it had a great message for the reader.

I liked that I was taken on so many journeys never knowing where it would lead.

Psychological slow burn

Be sure to get past the first 20 minutes and the book will slowly engross you and surprise you. (Especially for those that think they can’t learn anything from an Octegenarian….)

Jumbled and slow

The book is a little cluttered. It jumps all over the place and is hard to follow and the dialogue is really clunky in a lot of the flashbacks.