If your lover, son, or brother confided that you and he had shared many lives, for better and worse, over thousands of years, would you laugh? Recommend a psychiatrist? Or wonder? Perhaps find yourself on a journey once unthinkable?

Two-year-old Preston Clark tells his mother that he'd reigned as her king till he drank poisoned wine from a golden chalice. At first the family thinks his tale inspired by Grandma's tincture of opium. But one sister speaks a strange, private language with him. His other sister wrestles with jealousy of Preston and a less explicable aversion to him. His childhood sweetheart casts herself as his ancient queen.

Growing up, a gifted and scholarly Preston eschews flights of fancy. But as he, his family, and his sweetheart cope with love and mortality, perplexing and troubling new visions from ever more distant eras trace their relationships through millennia. Figments of a brilliant, idle brain? Disguised incest-wishes? Collective Unconscious, erupting into consciousness? Schizophrenic dreamscapes? Everybody has a theory or a smirk.

Sure to resonate with readers of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, Susan Barker's Incarnations, or Michael Newton's Journey of Souls, The Book of Lives links transgressions, transformations, hidden balances and hidden purposes that serial lives could encompass. It provokes an itch to think, wonder, and revisit the meaning of "Now".

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