The story opens with two long-time two friends Anna, a GP and Kathryn, the former offers to be a guinea pig for Kathryn, a clinical psychologist, to practice past life regression before she uses it on patients. After many sessions, they realise there is a connection between the lives Anna has lived and this one. They also notice there is a common theme throughout all the lives, a love of words and storytelling. The sessions are modelled on my own practice as a clinical hypnotherapist so I have encountered the typical reaction to issues such as death, where one has to reassure the client they are not reliving it but rather looking at the events from a distance, like watching a film, they see but do not feel the pain or the emotions of fear and terror as they would have done at the end of life in reality.
Each chapter in the book covers the most important episodes of the life and the death of that entity. Anna and Kathryn begin to understand to a greater extent their friendship as they have been together in past lives too, not always as friends, sometimes as partners.
Each life is a glimpse into a historical epoch and how it resonates with a person of that time. Sometimes the entity is female, sometimes male and in one life, they are transgender. This allows a look into the structure of that society and how they deal with different issues such as gender.
The historical events are as true to the time as my research showed, but they are not modelled on any one person either living or dead. However, many of the events are true and incorporated into the story as graphically as possible. Consequently, some of the end of life scenes are gruesome but true to historical facts while others are fabricated. The chapters are in chronological order but in real life, as it is also explained in the book the life is not presented in one neat, tidy piece per session. Each session would bring back different aspects of a life which they had pieced together, a bit like a jigsaw puzzle, to make it run as it does in the book. The lives start with a brief encounter in the legendary Atlantean times then move all over the world but sequentially to end with the horror of Hiroshima.
