Recursion by Blake crouch

One last book in the Blake Crouch series of novels :) Ithoda stopping it for now. Too much of dystopia and even normal mirror looks like "Black mirror" after reading all these books. Now, to the story.

I am not sure of the sequence or the order in which his books were written, leave alone getting published. But Recursion seems to be an extended version of Dark matter. In both the books, love and the quest to re-unite with your loved one across multiple timelines or universes seems to be the theme. 

In Recursion, the heroine invents a chair, which takes back people in time. She wants to help her mother suffering from Alzheimer, to restore her memories. As expected, the chair falls into other peoples hands and what happens forms the rest of the story. As an one liner, this may sound more sci-fi than emotional. But the way the chair transforms her life and the lives of everyone else in the world, forms the whole of the story. The hero happens to be an alcoholic (surprise! surprise!) trying to drown his sorrow of losing his only daughter in an accident, happens to get a taste of using the chair and gets to relive his time back with his daughter. In fact, the chair takes him back to the exact time when the accident is about to happen and he even saves his daughter. A fresh timeline is created where the daughter survives and bang on the day when the hero used to chair to travel back in time, the daughter gets deja vu of the incident and her dying and the aftermath. His wife, who had left him post the accident in the original timeline, gets to relive those sad memories as well and unable to bear the trauma that she had died in a different timeline and the emotional pain, the daughter jumps to her death. Just like the impacted family, every one who is aware of the daughter's death in the original timeline are also equally impacted by the sudden awareness of things that happened during that timeline. The heroine meets the hero in a bar, introducing herself as someone who knows him quite well and later tells the hero about the chair and how it had altered the timeline. She also tells the number of timelines in which they were a couple and how each time, she meets him at the bar and explains to him about the chair and the timeline concept, only to get either both of them killed or one of them getting killed, while they try to reset the timeline. 

In between, the plot gets a global angle with international governments, getting into the picture, each one trying to out do the other and eventually resulting in a nuclear war. The couple keep travelling to various places across the globe, each time ensuring the setup to create the chair is readily available for them to reset the timline in case of any eventuality and their love for each other keeps growing across every attempt. Finally, to break this cyclical loop, the hero revisits the original timeline, where it all started and manages to break the chain by killing the guy who is responsible for all of these changes, there by restoring the original timeline. The story ends with the hero meeting the heroine at the bar, again, for the first time.

But for the repetition, which becomes tedious, the way in which a new timeline and new set of events are established in each timeline, makes this book an interesting read. And with each iteration, the author cleverly reduces the amount of time taken to re establish the setup, trusting the readers to fill in the blanks. For those who care to read Crouch's books, Dark matter or Recursion would make a decent first choice.

Up Next: City and the sars as suggested by Thala :)