The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

During his fifth life, Harry seeks help managing the trauma of his previous torture and suicide. With limited options, he begins writing letters to his biological father, Rory. Using the pseudonym Private Harry Brookes, he adapts his own traumatic experiences into a fictional story of a tortured World War I prisoner.

Harry grows angry as weeks pass without a reply. Finally, a letter from Rory arrives, expressing profound empathy and solidarity as one soldier to another. Harry takes the compassionate letter into the woods, reads it, and burns it.

On July 1, 1940, during the London Blitz, a 22-year-old Harry waits in a city square. Living under a false identity after fleeing the draft, he meets with Virginia, as they arranged in his previous life. Virginia confirms that his suicide was necessary to protect the Cronus Club. As they walk through the city, Virginia assures him that he will have centuries to ask his questions.

Virginia leads Harry to the London headquarters of the Cronus Club. She explains the Club was founded by an 18th-century Bostonian named Sarah Siobhan Grey, who realized that kalachakra had a unique opportunity to pass knowledge and wealth backward and forward through time (e.g., by contacting a member of an earlier generation during one’s own childhood and asking them to pass a message on). Harry will afterward learn that this story about Sarah is largely a rumor; regardless, the club now stretches across both space and time, with evidence of its earliest chapter (in terms of linear time) usually dating to around 3000 BCE. Virginia’s current role is to care for newly discovered kalachakra children.

She outlines the Club’s rules: Members must not interfere with major events, harm another kalachakra, or fail to contribute financially to support the children. Virginia concludes with a critical warning: never to reveal the specific time and place of one’s birth, as an enemy could use it to prevent conception or birth, causing a final death.

Virginia illustrates the dangers of interfering with history (and of revealing one’s “point of origin”) by recounting the story of Victor Hoeness, a kalachakra who caused the Club’s “first cataclysm.” After a lifetime documenting the Thirty Years War, Hoeness broke the rule of non-interference in 1642 by sharing advanced knowledge, obtained from conversations with kalachakra from the future, with the French king, hoping to create a better world.

His actions triggered centuries of advanced warfare, and he imprisoned any dissenting kalachakra. This interference with history culminated in a global nuclear war in 1937. By 1953, all life on Earth was extinguished.

Virginia explains that the Club’s greatest grievance against Hoeness was that his actions prevented generations of new kalachakra from being born. She describes the two forms of true death a kalachakra can face: “The Forgetting,” a process that wipes the mind clean, and “abortion,” which entails preventing the birth of a kalachakra by one means or another.

When Hoeness learned, from future kalachakra, about the impact his actions were having, he refused to abandon the attempt. Therefore, the Club captured him during one of his childhoods, tortured him for his birth information, and then repeatedly mutilated and imprisoned him until he died, repeating the cycle in his next life. Finally, the Club voted to have Hoeness aborted. A “mnemonic” (a kalachakra with perfect recall) named Koch cautioned that this was the second such cataclysm he had witnessed and argued that the Club another option: loosen the rules surrounding noninterference. The Club ignored his warning, murdered Hoeness’s pregnant mother, and erased him from existence.

The narrative returns to the opening scene, where a 78-year-old Harry (now revealed to be a mnemonic himself) is dying in a Berlin hospital. A seven-year-old girl named Christa appears and delivers a message passed down from 1,000 years in the future: The world is ending, the process is accelerating, and it is his responsibility to stop it.

In his sixth life, while a tutor at Cambridge, Harry debates Vincent. Vincent proposes a theoretical device that could deduce the state of all matter in the universe, including its past and future. Harry becomes wary, cautioning that such knowledge would itself change the future. He also recognizes that Vincent has anachronistic knowledge of concepts like the strong nuclear force and challenges him on this. Dropping all pretense, Vincent demands to know if Harry is a member of the Cronus Club. When Harry confirms he is, Vincent hits him.

In his 12th life, a six-year-old Harry contacts the Cronus Club and travels alone to London, where he is met by a member named Charity Hazelmere. He attends a special assembly of the Club to discuss the world-ending message. A member named Anya observes that the apocalypse is happening earlier with each life cycle, suggesting a variable is actively changing. Building on this, Harry posits that a kalachakra must be the cause. The question, he declares, is not “why” the world is ending, but “who” is ending it.

During one of his lives, Harry forms a relationship with a woman named Rosemary Dawsett. She is murdered in 1951, but police rule her death a suicide. Harry identifies the killer as Richard Lisle and sends evidence to Scotland Yard, but they take no action. After Lisle kills again, Harry decides to murder him. He plans the act carefully, but when he confronts Lisle in a pub, he realizes Lisle has just claimed another victim. Overcome by rage, Harry abandons his plan and attacks Lisle in the street, where Lisle fatally stabs him.

Many lives later, Harry tells Virginia that he suspects his former student, Vincent, is the kalachakra responsible for the world’s accelerating end. Harry has discovered a technological anomaly in Russia that he plans to investigate and asks Virginia to pass his suspicions to the Cronus Club if he disappears. He recalls this lifetime’s 1924, when, at six years old, he delivered the apocalyptic message to a dying kalachakra named Joseph Kirkbriar Shotbolt, who was delighted by the novelty of the situation. Now, 30 years later, Harry boards a flight to Berlin to begin his investigation.

In his 12th life, in 1956, Harry recalls establishing his “portfolio existence.” At 11 years old, he used his knowledge of the future to build an investment firm, Waterbrooke & Smith. He runs the company from the shadows, providing him with a global intelligence network.

A report from his network details a new portable radio in West Germany, the PJC/9000, whose technology should not be invented for another 13 years. Harry identifies this anachronistic device as the anomaly he has been seeking, and it is this that he will refer to in his conversation with Virginia before traveling to Berlin.

Posing as a journalist in East Germany, Harry interviews Daniel van Thiel, the engineer credited with designing the PJC/9000. Van Thiel confides that Soviet science is advanced because they have somehow “seen the future” and names a Moscow scientist (142), Vitali Karpenko, as the man poised to change the world.

Days later, van Thiel is found hanged in a murder disguised as a suicide. Realizing the danger, Harry adopts a new alias and boards a ship to Leningrad to find Karpenko.

While on the train to Leningrad, Harry contemplates the purpose of his existence as a kalachakra, recalling past conversations with Vincent and wondering to what extent his own actions matter.

In March 1956, Harry arrives at the dilapidated Leningrad branch of the Cronus Club and meets Olga, one of its last members. A former aristocrat, she criticizes his poor tradecraft (Harry is posing as Russian), explaining that the Russian branch of the Club has been decimated by purges and defections. The few remaining members rely on blackmail to survive. Olga provides Harry with leverage against Professor Gulakov, the head of physics at the local academy—proof of his correspondence with an American professor. However, she warns him that using it will be dangerous.