Guess Who’s Back, Back Again: 5 Marvelous SFF Books About Reincarnation

Do you ever think you had a past life? Or lives? Maybe you were a blacksmith in medieval times, or a flapper, or a doctor during the plague. Many people and many religions believe it’s something that happens. Of course, mostly we hear stories involving people who think they were someone famous. (Abraham Lincoln, Napoleon, and Jesus are popular to have been at one time.)

But as Crash says in Bull Durham, “How come, in former lifetimes, everybody’s always somebody famous? How come nobody ever says they were Joe Schmo?” These five excellent books will look at reincarnations of “regular” people, people who are born again as someone else. In one of my favorite books about reincarnation, The Incarnations by Susan Barker, the main character is a taxi driver who learns all about his other lives and meets his soulmate.

Reincarnation stories differ from time loop stories. Time loops involve a person or people reliving a certain period of time over (and over). They are also different from time travel tales because they don’t change the date of where they are; they change who they are. Whether it’s an emperor, a doctor, a painter, or any other million things, reincarnation stories are always a good time!

The Emperor and the Endless Palace by Justinian Huang This is an exciting queer romantasy set across three periods of time, from 4 BCE, to 1740, to present-day Los Angeles. In each time, two men find one another again, showing the possibility of souls forever linked, who always find one another, no matter what happens. It’s an excellent debut: a love story across centuries, full of endless possibilities.

Reincarnation Blues by Michael Poore In this novel’s idea of reincarnation, people have 10,000 chances to be reborn so they can figure out everything there is to know about life and achieve enlightenment. But Milo has done a poor job figuring things out. He has already had 9,995 chances to work out the secrets of the cosmic universe and still hasn’t done it. He has five more tries. But at this point, he’d rather stay in the Afterlife, because he’s fallen in love with a woman he’s named Suzie. Suzie is actually Death, so there’s that, but no matter. Milo loves her. It is through this love he finds a reason for living that just may finally give him answers.

Meet Me in Another Life by Catriona Silvey This was one of my favorite books of 2021! It’s about Thora and Santi, two strangers who meet while at school in a foreign city and hit it off. Sadly, tragedy strikes soon after, and one of them dies. But don’t worry—they’ll be back again soon. Because Thora and Santi keep being reborn into this same city, each time with a different relationship to one another. Father-daughter, doctor-patient, coworkers—the list goes on. As they go through these versions, they start to remember more and more of their past lives. Thora and Santi will have to figure out what it all means and why they are forever in the city together.

The Memory Painter by Gwendolyn Womack Last but not least is this adventurous story about a painter and a scientist. Bryan is a famous painter who suffers terrible nightmares, which he then puts down on canvas. He has such vivid dreams that he thinks they must be versions of past lives. One day, a neurogeneticist named Linz recognizes the events in one of Bryan’s paintings, because they’re the same nightmares she had as a child. This meeting sets off Bryan’s most powerful dream yet, one where people die. He realizes he and Linz need to decipher it, because it’s going to happen, and only they can stop it.

Okay, star bits, now take the knowledge you have learned here today and use it for good, not evil. If you want to know more about books, I talk about books pretty much nonstop (when I’m not reading them), and you can hear me say lots of adjectives about them on the Book Riot podcast All the Books! and on Bluesky and  Instagram.

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The following comes to you from the Editorial Desk.

This week, we’re highlighting a post that had our Managing Editor Vanessa Diaz feeling a type of way. Now, even five years after it was published, Vanessa is still salty about American Dirt. Read on for an excerpt and become an All Access member to unlock the full post.

Picture it: The United States, January 2020. A book with a pretty blue and white cover is making the rounds on the bookish internet. The blue ink forms a beautiful hummingbird motif against a creamy background, a bird associated with the sun god Huitzilopochtli in Aztec mythology. Black barbed wire, at once delicate and menacing, cuts the pattern into a grid resembling an arrangement of Talavera tiles. The package is eye-catching, ostensibly Mexican in feel, and evocative of borders and the migrant experience. 

The book tells the story of a bookstore owner in Acapulco, Mexico, who is forced to flee her home when a drug cartel murders everyone in her family except for her young son at a quinceañera. She and the boy are forced to become migrants and embark on a treacherous journey north to the U.S. border, evading the cartel and befriending fellow migrants along the way. The book is being lauded not just as the “it” book of the season but as the immigration story. It gets the Oprah treatment and is praised by everyone from Salma Hayek to the great Sandra Cisneros, who called it “the great novel of Las Américas.” 

It’s been over five years, and this book is still the bane of my existence.

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