In a New Haven therapy office in 1971, two women lie down and begin remembering things that do not belong to this life. A green door. Stone steps. A collar heavy on the shoulders. Someone trained to be careful about what their body says, and someone who was supposed to come and did not.

Reincarnation braids three threads. The regression sessions in Frances Webb's office, where the remembering happens. The historical chapters set in the lives themselves, reaching back eighty-two thousand years across a toothache in seventh-century Basra, bad light on a Tuesday in fifteenth-century Florence, a hand rising toward a stranger across a fire in East Africa for a reason the body cannot explain. And the ordinary present, where Diana and Ruth have to decide what any of it means. The past lives are filtered through two modern, analytical women looking backward through more accumulated life than recorded history contains, so the extraordinary always arrives with ordinary texture.

At its center are two souls and one connection that keeps returning, life after life, in the same shape: someone who was supposed to come and did not. It is a love story measured in lifetimes, an ambitious structure that holds, written for readers who can carry a premise without being asked to believe it and who do not need the metaphysics settled by the last page. The novel grew out of the author's own conviction that consciousness persists and moves on, and his interest in what that looks like from the inside, which philosophy cannot show but fiction can. Standalone. 532 pages.

Content warning: war deaths, illness, and mid-century psychiatric confinement.