Replay

Jeff Winston is 43, a radio journalist, when he dies of a heart attack in 1988. He wakes up in 1963, eighteen years old, a student at Emory University in Atlanta, with every memory of the twenty five years he has just lived. He tries to stop the Kennedy assassination. He makes a fortune betting and investing on what he knows is coming. Then, at 43, he dies again in 1988 and wakes once more in the past, a little later each time.

So Replay becomes a novel of lives rather than a life. Jeff tries wealth, marriage to his college girlfriend, drugs and excess, each version of himself a different answer to the question of what a person would do with unlimited second chances. Then he sees a film called Starsea and realizes its maker, Pamela Phillips, must be replaying too. They find each other and fall in love, and they are not alone: a third replayer turns up, an institutionalized killer who believes aliens are forcing him to murder. When Jeff and Pamela go public with predictions of coming disasters, the government locks them up and exploits them. Meanwhile the cycles shrink, until Pamela wakes only hours before her own death. In the last cycle both survive their 1988 heart attacks and walk into a future neither has seen, and an epilogue suggests they were never the only ones.

The premise does most of the work, and it is a very good premise. The book reads quickly and is built in episodes, one life at a time, which Kirkus disliked, calling it "a numbingly episodic novel." Rereading it in 2025, Ian Sales found it "a fun, if a little mawkish, read" and its ending a letdown. Readers who enjoy what if stories, or who have watched a film about a repeating day and wanted the long version, will find it hard to put down.