The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

Harry awakens in a padded cell, restrained and connected to an IV drip. Vincent sits with him, expressing sadness over the situation and then demands Harry reveal his point of origin—his place and date of birth. Vincent explains that he needs this information as leverage to prevent Harry from revealing Vincent’s plans. Because Harry is (chronologically) older than Vincent, he deduces that Vincent must have an older accomplice. When Harry refuses to talk, Vincent threatens him with torture, giving him one day to reconsider.

The next day, Harry pulls out his IV to lure guards into his cell and attempts to manipulate them with threats. A torturer arrives and begins a session of chemical and psychological torment. Later, one of the men he threatened, a sergeant, secretly passes him rat poison.

Harry ingests the poison, causing his organs to fail. Realizing that Harry is dying and he will not get the information, Vincent has him moved to the infirmary. He changes his plan, deciding to erase Harry’s memory. As Harry’s state deteriorates, doctors use a machine to perform a procedure known to kalachakra as “the Forgetting.”

During one of his previous lives, Harry visits Akinleye at a hospital. It is 1989, and she is dying of AIDS. Tormented by memories of past lives, she asks Harry to perform the Forgetting on her to be free of deeds she finds unbearable.

Harry tries to dissuade her but eventually relents. He retrieves the necessary device from the Chicago Cronus Club and administers the procedure. Three days later, Akinleye awakens with no memory of her past lives or Harry; she is confused and frightened, but Harry comforts her, and she dies peacefully the next morning.

Immediately after the procedure at Pietrok-112, Harry awakens in the infirmary and discovers the Forgetting has failed; his memory is intact. He quickly decides to feign amnesia. When Vincent appears, Harry pretends to be incapable of speaking, eventually vomiting blood as the poison takes its final toll. Convinced Harry’s memory is gone, Vincent orders the guards to execute him. They drag him to a shower room, where a guard shoots him in the head.

Reborn into his 13th life, Harry regains his memories and runs away from home at age six to warn the Cronus Club about Vincent. He travels to Newcastle to meet his contact, Charity Hazelmere, but she never arrives.

Sensing a trap, Harry continues to London. He finds the Cronus Club headquarters is no longer a clubhouse and is under surveillance. Harry flees, understanding that the Club has already fallen.

Harry returns home, where he is punished for running away. He grows up ostracized until the death of his adoptive mother, Harriet. Afterward, his aunt Alexandra secretly tutors him.

At 15, Harry leaves home and researches the Cronus Club’s fate. He discovers the London and Vienna branches dissolved around the turn of the century and can’t make contact with any others. This affirms his belief that Vincent must have an older accomplice who began attacking the Club decades earlier, preventing kalachakra from being born. It also occurs to him that Vincent might simply have wiped the memories of Club members, as he attempted to do to Harry himself. He travels to Vienna to search for clues.

In Vienna, Harry operates under false identities while searching for information. He finds a clue in the will of a deceased Club member, Theodore Himmel. Following instructions, Harry digs up Himmel’s grave and unearths an iron box.

Inside is a stone carved with a message revealing that since 1894, kalachakra have been systematically targeted, either through the Forgetting or by being murdered before birth. The message ends with a warning that the Cronus Club has become a trap. Harry reburies the stone.

To build an information network while remaining hidden, Harry becomes a professional money launderer, amassing a fortune and a web of contacts. For cover, he marries a linear woman named Mei and settles into a quiet life in New Jersey.

Harry uses his network to investigate the fate of other Cronus Club members. In 1954, he visits a fellow kalachakra in Devon, England, Phillip Hopper, and confirms that he has been a victim of the Forgetting, retaining no memory of past lives.

Harry concludes that if any Cronus Club branch survived, it would be the isolated Beijing Club. He travels there in 1958, posing as a Soviet academic during the Great Leap Forward. His movements are heavily restricted, making a direct search impossible. To circumvent these restrictions, Harry hires triad members from Hong Kong to discreetly search for any sign of the Club. While waiting, he maintains his cover, teaching industrial dogma at a local university.

Eventually, a triad contact arranges a meeting. Harry is blindfolded and taken to a house, where a teenage girl named Yoong, a member of the Beijing Cronus Club, interrogates him. Yoong confirms their club has also been attacked but is wary about saying more, concerned that Harry could be a threat.

Four days later, however, Yoon comes to Harry again with crucial intelligence. She reveals that mass Forgettings began in 1953, but pre-birth killings started as early as 1896 and spiked in 1931. This timeline suggests the involvement of a second, younger accomplice—Vincent. In exchange for access to Harry’s network, Yoong gives him the name of the primary suspect for the pre-birth murders.

Harry meets Akinleye in the lives that follow her Forgetting. In her first life, she does not know her true nature but has dreams for the future that Harry encourages. In her second life, he finds her as a child, hospitalized for the “madness” caused by her fragmented memories. He rescues her from an abusive institution and takes her to the Accra Cronus Club; he then builds a humane hospital to replace the one where she was held.

Years later, Harry meets her working as a doctor in Sierra Leone. She reflects on her past self’s decision to undergo the Forgetting, and Harry reassures her that, for the person she was, it was the right choice.

In February 1960 of his 13th life, Harry uses his network to track Vincent’s suspected accomplice to a farm in South Africa. He and a team of mercenaries raid the property and confront its owner: Virginia.

Terminally ill, Virginia confesses to preventing the births of kalachakra to help Vincent build what she calls a “kind of god” (307)—the quantum mirror. As punishment, Harry orders the Forgetting procedure performed on her, erasing her identity and all memory of her past lives.

Harry spends the rest of his 13th life evading Vincent, dying of a planned overdose in 2003. He is reborn into his 14th life with a new strategy: to keep a low profile. He avoids the Cronus Club and, in 1937, earns a scholarship to Cambridge. Before he leaves, his biological grandmother, Constance Hulne, summons him to Hulne House. She berates him for his academic ambition, viewing it as ungratefulness. Amused by her condescension, Harry rejects her demands that he stay and work on the estate and instead leaves for Cambridge.

During World War II, Harry works in military intelligence and notices the appearance of anachronistic technology. After the war, he confirms his suspicion that scientific progress is accelerating unnaturally when he speaks to someone who received a kidney transplant years before the technology should exist.

Having deduced that the United States is the source of the technological boom, Harry becomes a science journalist and travels to the US to investigate Vincent’s influence. There, he discovers that Vincent is seeding breakthroughs through anonymous letters. Eventually, Harry’s work leads him to a party in Louisiana, where he is introduced to a man named Simon Ransome, whom Harry immediately as Vincent.

Earlier in his 14th life, Harry travels to the Library of Congress and finds Charity Hazelmere there. Now an old woman, she still remembers her past lives. Initially suspicious, she listens as he explains his new strategy: to act as bait to draw Vincent into the open. Understanding the plan’s necessity, Charity agrees to act as his hidden ally.

At the party in Louisiana, Harry maintains his composure while meeting Vincent, disguised as Simon Ransome. He realizes Vincent is testing him for any sign of recognition, unaware that the Forgetting at Pietrok-112 failed.

Harry successfully plays the part of an innocent, recently awakened kalachakra. He allows their hostess to lead him away, breaking contact with Vincent without arousing suspicion.

For three months, Harry maintains his cover while his allies plant a false history regarding his place of birth and the circumstances of his adoption. Vincent, as Simon Ransome, eventually calls and arranges a meeting. Playing the part of a wealthy idler, Vincent asks Harry to investigate a technology company for him.

Harry understands that this is a pretext for Vincent to get closer and agrees. His investigation reveals the company is working on technology 20 years ahead of its time, confirming it is one of Vincent’s front organizations.

Between 1969 and 1978, Harry becomes Vincent’s trusted associate while secretly gathering information and preparing a falsified report on quantum mirror research, hiding his own advanced understanding of the subject. During a dinner, Vincent praises the report and questions Harry about his background; Harry lies and claims to be from Leeds. He also discovers that Vincent’s family history is a fabrication.

In 1978, Vincent hosts a party at his mansion in Maine and announces his engagement. Harry is stunned to see that the fiancée is Jenny. He recalls having told Vincent about her years ago. As Vincent kisses Jenny, he looks directly at Harry. To conceal his devastation, Harry applauds with the crowd but later breaks down, weeping alone in the garden.