Book
A Possible Life
First published 2012
Five linked narratives move across roughly two centuries, from a Victorian workhouse to occupied Europe and onward into the modern and imagined future. Geoffrey, a schoolmaster turned soldier, is captured after clandestine work in France; Billy grows up amid poverty and institutional life in Victorian England; other sections follow a scientist, a devout Frenchwoman and an American musician.
The stories are connected less by plot than by recurring questions about identity, memory, consciousness and the consequences of choices made under pressure. By placing private lives against war, poverty, science and social change, the novel asks how much of a person survives in the lives and memories of others.
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