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Audible sample Sample
Replay Paperback – July 22, 1998
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Jeff Winston, forty-three, didn't know he was a replayer until he died and woke up twenty-five years younger in his college dorm room; he lived another life. And died again. And lived again and died again -- in a continuous twenty-five-year cycle -- each time starting from scratch at the age of eighteen to reclaim lost loves, remedy past mistakes, or make a fortune in the stock market. A novel of gripping adventure, romance, and fascinating speculation on the nature of time, Replay asks the question: "What if you could live your life over again?"
- Print length320 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateJuly 22, 1998
- Reading age14 - 18 years
- Dimensions5.5 x 0.8 x 8.25 inches
- ISBN-10068816112X
- ISBN-13978-0688161125
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From the Back Cover
Jeff Winston, forty-three, didn't know he was a replayer until he died and woke up twenty-five years younger in his college dorm room; he lived another life. And died again. And lived again and died again -- in a continuous twenty-five-year cycle -- each time starting from scratch at the age of eighteen to reclaim lost loves, remedy past mistakes, or make a fortune in the stock market. A novel of gripping adventure, romance, and fascinating speculation on the nature of time, Replay asks the question: "What if you could live your life over again?"
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Replay
By Ken GrimwoodHarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Copyright ©2006 Ken GrimwoodAll right reserved.
ISBN: 068816112X
Chapter One
Jeff Winston was on the phone with his wife when he died.
"We need -- " she'd said, and he never heard her say just what it was they needed, because something heavy seemed to slam against his chest, crushing the breath out of him. The phone fell from his hand and cracked the glass paperweight on his desk.
Just the week before, she'd said something similar, had said, "Do you know what we need, Jeff?" and there'd been a pause -- not infinite, not final, like this mortal pause, but a palpable interim nonetheless. He'd been sitting at the kitchen table, in what Linda liked to call the "breakfast nook," although it wasn't really a separate space at all, just a little formica table with two chairs placed awkwardly between the left side of the refrigerator and the front of the clothes drier. Linda had been chopping onions at the counter when she said it, and maybe the tears at the corner of her eyes were what had set him thinking, had lent her question more import than she'd intended.
"Do you know what we need, Jeff?"
And he was supposed to say, "What's that, hon?" was supposed to say it distractedly and without interest as he read Hugh Sidey's column about the presidency in Time. But Jeff wasn't distracted; he didn't give a damn about Sidey's ramblings. He was in fact more focused and aware than he had been in a long, long time. So he didn't say anything at all for several moments; he just stared at the false tears in Linda's eyes and thought about the things they needed, he and she.
They needed to get away, for starters, needed to get on a plane going someplace warm and lush -- Jamaica, perhaps, or Barbados. They hadn't had a real vacation since that long-planned but somehow disappointing tour of Europe five years ago. Jeff didn't count their annual Florida trips to see his parents in Orlando and Linda's family in Boca Raton; those were visits to an ever-receding past, nothing more. No, what they needed was a week, a month, on some decadently foreign island: making love on endless empty beaches, and at night the sound of reggae music in the air like the smell of hot red flowers.
A decent house would be nice, too, maybe one of those stately old homes on Upper Mountain Road in Montclair that they'd driven past so many wistful Sundays. Or a place in White Plains, a twelve-room Tudor on Ridgeway Avenue near the golf courses. Not that he'd want to take up golf; it just seemed that all those lazy expanses of green, with names like Maple Moor and Westchester Hills, would make for more pleasant surroundings than did the on ramps to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the glide path into LaGuardia.
They also needed a child, though Linda probably felt that lack more urgently than he. Jeff always pictured their never-born child as being eight years old, having skipped all the demands of infancy and not yet having reached the torments of puberty. A good kid, not overly cute or precocious. Boy, girl, it didn't matter; just a child, her child and his, who'd ask funny questions and sit too close to the TV set and show the spark of his or her own developing individuality.
There'd be no child, though; they'd known that was impossible for years, since Linda had gone through the ectopic pregnancy in 1975. And there wouldn't be any house in Montclair or White Plains, either; Jeff's position as news director of New York's WFYI all-news radio sounded more prestigious, more lucrative, than it actually was. Maybe he'd still make the jump to television; but at forty-three, that was growing increasingly unlikely.
We need, we need... to talk, he thought. To look each other straight in the eye and just say: It didn't work. None of it, not the romance or the passion or the glorious plans. It all went flat, and there's nobody to blame. That's simply the way it happened.
But of course they'd never do that. That was the main part of the failure, the fact that they seldom spoke of deeper needs, never broached the tearing sense of incompletion that stood always between them.
Linda wiped a meaningless, onion-induced tear away with the back of her hand. "Did you hear me, Jeff?"
"Yes. I heard you."
"What we need," she said, looking in his direction but not quite at him, "is a new shower curtain."
In all likelihood, that was the level of need she'd been about to express over the phone before he began to die. " -- a dozen eggs," her sentence probably would have ended, or " -- a box of coffee filters."
But why was he thinking all this? he wondered. He was dying, for Christ's sake; shouldn't his final thoughts be of something deeper, more philosophical? Or maybe a fast-speed replay of the highlights of his life, forty-three years on Betascan. That was what people went through when they drowned, wasn't it?
This felt like drowning, he thought as the expanded seconds passed: the awful pressure, the hopeless struggle for breath, the sticky wetness that soaked his body, as salt sweat streamed down his forehead and stung his eyes.
Drowning. Dying. No, shit, no, that was an unreal word, applicable to flowers or pets or other people. Old people, sick people. Unlucky people.
His face dropped to the desk, right cheek pressing flat against the file folder he'd been about to study when Linda called. The crack in the paperweight was cavernous before his one open eye: a split in the world itself, a jagged mirror of the ripping agony inside him. Through the broken glass he could see the glowing red numerals on the digital clock atop his bookshelf:
1:06 PM Oct 18 88
And then there was nothing more to avoid thinking about, because the process of thought had ceased.
Continues...
Excerpted from Replayby Ken Grimwood Copyright ©2006 by Ken Grimwood. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- Publisher : William Morrow Paperbacks (July 22, 1998)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 320 pages
- ISBN-10 : 068816112X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0688161125
- Reading age : 14 - 18 years
- Item Weight : 10.2 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #14,834 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #83 in Time Travel Fiction
- #179 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- #1,029 in Romantic Fantasy (Books)
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Author Grimwood cycles Jeff back into his own life, so that the changes he's made from cycle-to-cycle are not "saved" in the timeline. Thus, each time he's returned to the past, Kennedy can be assassinated again, he is dating the same girl, etc. How each of these iterations plays out, based on his choices and the consequences of actions in the various loops, forms the plot. To discuss it further would cause spoilers, but more importantly remove from the process of discovery that the reader and the character(s) are going on, to the detriment of the reader's enjoyment. After all, we know what's going to happen: Jeff dies in 1988 and is regenerated to replay his adult life. It's not the destination but the journey that makes the novel worth reading.
And it is worth reading - this is perhaps the fastest I've finished a novel in several years. After a bit of a slow start, and once the surrounding cast is fleshed out (themselves not repeating but coming into and out of Jeff's life), you can't put the book down. Will Linda (his first wife) appear in this iteration? What happens to Judy, the college sweetheart? The poignant moments are when decisions are made that ultimately cause him to be a stranger to someone with whom he was intimate in a previous iteration, and all the loss that implies.
The book is not science fiction - no attempt is made to physically explain Jeff's repeating (although he himself worries about it). There is no "Groundhog Day" requirement that Jeff grow as a person in order to escape the time loop. Rather, it is more a meditation, perhaps an "adventure", on how decisions lead to branching realities that can be either good or bad. Grimwood's writing makes it all very intriguing and grips you right to the end.
"Reply" begins by showing ubiquitous, 40-something everyman Jeff Winston dying of a seemingly random heart attack in October of 1988. Upon dying, Jeff instantly wakes up 25 years earlier as the 18-year-old version of himself, replete with all his memories and knowledge from the life he just left. Jeff, essentially, has the opportunity to live his life anew knowing what the future has in store for him. The possibilities, obviously, prove endless. Knowing the outcome of every major sporting event in the next 25 years, Jeff becomes a gambling phenom who is able to build a fortune unavailable to him in his previous life. Aside from providing himself with vast new riches, Jeff now has the opportunity to live his life to a different degree. This opportunity, of course, poses plenty of possibilities, all stemming from the same question: if you could do it all over again, would you? The obvious answer, and the one Jeff picks, is a resounding "No," and Grimwood brings his reader along for the ride while exploring what Jeff does differently.
"Replay" works on a number of levels. Grimwood is fully aware of the obvious choices anyone would make in Jeff's shoes (i.e. would I marry the same women? Would I follow the same career path? Would I take that one big risk I always regretted not taking, etc.), and clearly touches upon those choices in appropriate measures. Where the book thrives, however, is Grimwood's exploration of the less-than-obvious choices: Would I try to save JFK? Would I try to prevent Gaddafi's rise to power? Would I try to change the world for the better? It's in these facets and more that Grimwood gives the reader a chance to sit in Jeff's mind while he wonders if his repercussions could benefit humanity or endanger it.
On a wider scale, "Replay" offers the reader a chance to ponder our own individual impact on the world around us. While Jeff "replays" his life not just once, but several times over, he constantly ponders his lot in life. He often wonders why he was offered this opportunity and how he could best use it. These questions come up while he also sets out to discover if he is the only one experiencing these replays of if there are others like him. Grimwood takes these seemingly singular ideas and threads them into some of the more grandiose questions we often find ourselves asking, primarily, "Why am I here?"
Along with offering his readers plenty of meaty, hypothetical bones to chew on, Grimwood also tells a damn fine story. His prose are cleanly structured but still emote a subtle, subliminal pathos that, much of the time, may better convey what the reader is feeling from Jeff's story than they could explain themselves. Grimwood does a masterful job of pacing a story that could have easily been told in 20 volumes into a hearty 300 pages. It's very rare that a book of speculative fiction can offer something for literally everybody, but Grimwood's ultimate "What if...?" story truly does contain something that is capable of evoking an emotion out of any reader. Highly recommended.
Michael P. Ferrari
Author, Assault on the Senses
I'm sure the basic premise has been employed in many previous novels, but Grimwood tackles it well and it thus became a best selling novel. Plus he adds a new twist: While living his second life, Jeff dies again on precisely the same date he did before, and once again finds himself back in college at 18 years of age. This cycle occurs a few times over the course of the novel, though the date on which he wakes up changes a bit each time...
Everyone has wished to be able to replay certain events in their life that went wrong, so as to have a chance to make them right. Well, Replay goes farther than that and plays out, in good detail, the fantasy of being able to relive many years of your life knowing what you know now. Though I never felt that I could really see myself making most of the same decisions that Jeff did during his replays, Grimwood's narration was good enough that I could easily imagine myself in Jeff's shoes while reading the novel. A good book, worth your time.
Top reviews from other countries
Die Hintergrundstory ist sehr schnelle erzählt: der Protagonist stirbt im ersten Satz auf der ersten Seite - und wacht sofort wieder 25 Jahre in seiner Vergangenheit auf, mit der kompletten Erinnerung an alles, was ihm passiert ist.
Er hat also die Gelegenheit, sein Leben noch einmal zu leben und jetzt alles besser zu machen.
Diese simple Ausgangsposition hat sich sicherlich jeder schon mal durch den Kopf gehen lassen, in der Art von "Was würde ich selbst anders machen, wenn ich jetzt nochmal zurückgehen könnte".
Nun, dieses Buch gibt einige sehr interessante Denkanstöße. Es ist nicht nur eine spannende utopische Geschichte, sondern meiner Ansicht nach auch eine interessante philosophische Abhandlung über den Sinn des Lebens, die Suche nach dem Glück und die Akzeptanz eigener Entscheidungen.
Alles in allem: ein wirklich sehr empfehlenswertes Buch - eine spannende Lektüre und faszinierender Denkanstoß in einem!