However, Grimwood’s answers to life’s questions aren’t terribly revelatory. Replay stays focused on the question: “How should life be lived?” But the story intensifies as options to change the course of Jeff’s life decrease, thanks to an ever contracting time loop. Replay is more about Jeff’s spiritual evolution than an action based plot, reading like a more emotionally resonant version of The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, a book I also enjoyed but which lost me when the focus turned to Harry’s fight against an evil super-villain.

After all, there’s a certain predictability to the answer to the question: how would a person live if they had a second chance? So the reader is along for the ride as Jeff loses himself in avarice, power, hedonism, saving the world, and love. And Jeff Winston’s tactics, as he faces the future with knowledge of what that future holds, feel realistic. Grimwood beautifully describes the confusion, melancholy and excitement a life reboot would evoke. In Ken Grimwood’s novel, Replay, Jeff Winston wakes from a soured marriage, a mediocre career, and fatal heart attack to find himself in his eighteen-year-old body. And this sort of backward time travel makes a great story because almost everybody can relate to the question: What if I had only…? Some times, the travel results in a ground hog day-like scenario, an awakening back to the early days of the character’s life.

And whether transported by a machine, magic objects, reincarnation or dream, characters find themselves back in time. So fictional travel back in time occurs rather frequently. But there’s no reason to allow pesky reality to interfere with good fiction. Experts claim that time travel into the past defies the universal laws of physics.

Replay ken grimwood summary