Come Again

By: Robert Webb

Narrated by: Olivia Colman

Length: 7 hrs and 47 mins

Publisher's summary

Can you fall in love for the first time twice? A recently widowed women is about to find out when she wakes up and finds herself 18 again in this "highly entertaining" story of second chances (Guardian) by the star of Peep Show.

Kate's husband Luke - the man she loved from the moment she met him 28 years ago - died suddenly. Since then she has pushed away her friend and lost her job, and everything is starting to fall apart.

One day, she wakes up in the wrong room and in the wrong body. She is 18 again but remembers everything. This is her college room in 1992 on the first day of orientation. And this is the day she meets Luke.

Kate knows how he died, and that he's already ill. But Luke is not the man that she lost: he's still a boy - the annoying 19-year-old English student she first met. If they can fall in love again despite everything, she might just be able to save him. She's going to try to do everything exactly the same....

©2020 Robert Webb (P)2020 Little, Brown & Company

Critic reviews

"Splendidly bleak, fabulously Nineties, and enjoyable." (Daily Mail (UK))

"A genre-defying time-travel tale - part adventure, part love story, part comedy, part dissertation on bereavement...a breathtakingly insightful evocation of grief." (Sunday Times (UK))

"Funny, brilliant, clever and unpredictable; I gobbled it up." (Jenny Colgan, USA Today best-selling author of The Bookshop on the Corner)

Interesting to say the least

I honestly wasn’t sure what i expected going into this story. There are so many elements it’s hard to describe what it is. Is it a love story? Is it a time travel story? Is it an action thriller? It’s giving tonal whiplash, and right when you’re getting invested in one element of the story, it’s snatched right from under you. I suppose my advice would be to go into expecting nothing at all and being open to anything.

A thoroughly delightful audiobook

This is just the sort of listen you need when what's happening around the world or in your life is starting to wear on you. Olivia Colman's narration is word perfect. I look forward to any more fiction that Robert Webb writes.

Started out Well; Lost its Way a Bit

I absolutely loved Robert Webb's autobiography and am a fan in general. So, I decided to give this a go. It started out very well, but seemed to end up with just way too much going on by at least the last ⅓rd of the book—much of it being just oddly over-the-top.

I didn't feel like I really knew the characters outside of the main character, Kate, which made emotional investment difficult.

I kept getting the nagging feeling that the book started out life as a comedy screenplay and was reshaped into a novel. It just has that quality with the style of dialogue; of coming off more as scenes prepared for a film script instead of a book; of speeding through things a bit too quickly; of much more summarization, much less exposition.

That being said, I do adore Webb and would gladly try another future book from him.

Excellent

I began reading Mr. Webb’s memoir, How Not to Be a Boy, without high expectations. I thought it would likely be good. It turned out to be superb. So I began this book with high expectations. They were more than met. It doesn’t hurt that Olivia Colman narrates, but even the best narrator can’t elevate crap substance by much, if at all. No elevation is needed here. The story is compelling, inventive and beautifully written.