Meet Me in Another Life: A Novel

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You do.” The conviction burns him: she is the revelation, and she knows it. He slams his hands down on the counter. “Tell me,” he shouts. “Tell me what’s happening to me.” Thora and Santi keep meeting each other in different lives. But romance is not the focus. In some worlds they become friends. In some they become colleagues. In the rare case they become lovers. And sometimes they are enemies. It's a pretentious thing to say. But Thora has to admit that's exactly how this feels: a moment taken out of time, with no beginning or end.Imagine you are looking at the screen in a large cinema. There are blips in the image, fleeting, but present. As the film moves on to the next scene, there are more blips, holes in the image, with another image, another, pentimento film, going on behind the up-front film. Another scene on the big screen, with more blip, until the characters in the front film, look at each other and say, “did you see that?” As they slowly become more and more aware that there is something going on in the film behind them, they turn and watch, and their behavior in the front film changes, to take account of the new knowledge.

Silvey's greatest strength is the way she makes you care. Not only for the character, but also for the mystery itself. She seeds clues throughout the novel, brings you to the edge of your seat when you least expected it, and rips your heart out. Several times. Meet Me In Another Life is the joyful, devastating and quietly profound debut speculative science fiction novel from Catriona Silvey in which it is asked: is it possible to remember someone you have seemingly never met ever before, and, if so, how? Thora Lišková and Santiago López meet for the first time when they are eighteen. Strangers in a foreign city, they both attend the campus at Cologne University in Germany, she as a student and he as a custodian. They bond over their shared ambition to travel to the stars. Thora thinks she’s finally found a kindred spirit, a friend for life. Until, days later, Santi is cruelly snatched away from her. That’s not the only way it happens. Santi meets Thora for the first time when he is 45, and she walks into his science classroom, a seven-year-old student who dreams of the stars; when he walks into her medical practice as an elderly patient; when her parents adopt him, aged five, as her brother; when they face each other on opposing sides of a bloody civil war. Life after life, haunted by impossible memories, Thora and Santi manage to find each other. I have to begin with a huge applause to Kristin Atherton for the fantastic narration. As a listener she drew me in and I felt that the voices she gave to Thora and Santi were brilliant. She captured their personality and made them recognisable. All the different accents were delivered flawlessly and her ability to portray the emotion and different aged voices was exceptional. The answers they lead to orbit around the constant desire, where both Santi and Thora are always longing to live an exceptional life, or at least one that is different from the current life they are living – and isn’t that just the most universal concept of all?

Catriona Silvey

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As the book goes on it definitely seemed more like a novel. And it was interesting to see how the two characters acted. However, the explanation at the end was super weird and not very satisfying. the relationships: again, the ways the relationships evolve are fantastic. I cried early on in this book.This was a lot of fun! I love video game glitches – I grew up playing the Tomb Raider games, and one of my favourite things was to use the physics glitch near the door of Lara’s mansion to jump up onto the roof and swan-dive into her swimming pool. But dropping such a blatant glitch too near the beginning of the book would obviously give the game away! So instead, I started with the idea that if you lived inside a simulation, a bug would be indistinguishable from a miracle. Faced with an event that breaks the normal rules of reality, you effectively have two choices: either you decide something supernatural is going on, or you try and explain it away. And those possibilities map nicely onto Santi and Thora’s different ways of looking at the world. So really, I just focused on how each of them interprets the early glitches they encounter. That way, even when more outlandish things start happening, it all stays grounded in the reality of the characters. I mean, what did I do?” Thora asks. “When was the moment you decided—this is it, it’s working, I’ll stay?” The book is divided into three parts. It almost reads like a bunch of short stories. Each story features the same two characters. But they are different ages in each story. This is a creative idea. But I thought that there would maybe be three stories with the couple falling in love in each dimension. But that is not what this story is at all.