With Prime, Kindle owners can choose from over 300,000 titles to borrow for free – including all seven Harry Potter books and more than 100 current and former New York Times best sellers. Borrow a book as frequently as once per month, with no due dates. Learn more about Kindle Owners' Lending Library.
The Kindle Owners' Lending Library gives you access to thousands of books, including New York Times bestsellers, to borrow and read for free.
Borrow a book as frequently as once per month
No due dates - keep books as long as you like and return them when it's time for something new
Read on any Amazon Kindle device
Amazon Prime members also enjoy:
Unlimited streaming of thousands of popular movies and TV shows with Prime Instant Video
FREE Two-Day Shipping on millions of items, with no minimum order size
For more information about the Kindle Owners' Lending Library visit our help page.
Summer Reading
Browse the best books of summer including blockbusters, beach reads, and editors' picks in our Summer Reading Store.
'I was hooked - grabbed immediately and finished it in one sitting'
'Beautiful, simple, evocative'
'Groundbreaking fiction'
'A strange and stubborn book, visual and visceral, original and odd... will stay with you long after finishing its final pages' - For Books' Sake
The Red Season is the first episode of the four-part novel My Memories of a Future Life. Each episode is novella length (one-quarter of the full novel, which is 360 pages) and was released on Kindle throughout September 2011. Episode 2 was published on September 5, Episode 3 on September 12, and the final episode on September 19th 2011.
If you were somebody’s past life…
What echoes would you leave in their soul? Could they be the answers you need now?
It’s a question Carol never expected to face. She’s a gifted musician who needs nothing more than her piano and certainly doesn’t believe she’s lived before. But forced by injury to stop playing, she fears her life may be over. Enter her soulmate Andreq: healer, liar, fraud and loyal friend. Is he her future incarnation or a psychological figment? And can his story help her discover how to live now?
A novel in the vein of The Time Traveller’s Wife, Vertigo and The Gargoyle, My Memories of a Future Life is much more than a 'who was I' tale. It’s a provocative study of the shadows we don’t know are driving our lives, from our own pasts and from the people with us right now. An examination of what we believe, what we create and how we scare and heal each other.
Above all, it’s the story of how one lost soul searches for where she now belongs.
'I was always fascinated by tales of regression to past lives,' says the author Roz Morris. ‘I thought, what if instead of going to the past, someone went to a future life? Who would do that? Why? What would they find?
‘I began to delve into the world of the classical musician. Musical scores are exacting and dictatorial - you play a note for perhaps a sixth of a second and not only that, there are instructions for how to feel - expressivo, amoroso.
'It's as if you don't play a piece of classical music; you channel the spirit of the composer. And I thought, what if she couldn’t do it any more? And then, what if I threw her together with someone who could trap the part of her that responded so completely to music?’
This is episode 1 of four. Episode 2 was published on 5 September 2011.
Roz Morris is a writer, journalist, fiction editor and the author of Nail Your Novel: Why Writers Abandon Books and How You Can Draft, Fix and Finish With Confidence. She has a secret identity as a ghostwriter and is the author of several bestsellers under other names.
I have to confess that after the first episode, I'm still slightly confused as to what's going on. That's not a bad thing - but be aware that this is not a complete story. It's the opening part of a 4-parter. I'm very much looking forward to the next part (due out next week) - a feeling I haven't had before with prose. We're used to episodic content in comics or TV, but it's a form that's more or less disappeared from literary fiction since the glory days of pulp SF magazines.
Roz's writing is beautiful, simple, and evocative. She makes you empathize with the characters almost instinctively, despite - or more likely because of - their flaws and weaknesses. They, more than the plot, are what kept me reading until I'd finished the book in one sitting. I cared what happened to them more than I cared what happened next.
I've given this four stars rather than five only because I'm still unsure where this is going. The story could develop in several different ways, some of which appeal to me more than others. The elements of hypnosis, sci-fi and time travel are intriguing, but I'm hoping the Ripper sub-plot doesn't turn out to be too much of a cliche. Roll on September 5 and Episode #2!
Morris successfully draws the reader into the psyche of the protagonist, which teeters precariously between worlds that are both painfully shrinking and cryptically unfolding before her.
The author's style emerges as that of an Imagist--one who employs a succinct economy of words to isolate and reveal the essence of a 'thing'--yet, her oftentimes lilting prose and engaging manner frees the mind to conjure the more sublime, expansive, and visionary landscapes of the Romantic aesthete.
There are no Pinter-pauses, nor any Osborne-outbursts; rather, "The Red Season" shimmers with the beauty of a well-penned sonnet and rolls forward like a Whitman entertaining a Ferlinghetti-strut.
Musically speaking (which seems appropriate, given the story's motif), the overall tempo of the piece is 'allegretto vivace,' with the persistent Gene Winter and recurring themes--such as those involving white gloves and lime green Post-Its--acting as grace notes. This enhancement of an undulating rhythm is directly connected to the real excitement of Morris' writing: in this first episode she has begun to layer her characters' encounters with their subconscious into a 'mythopoeian' canon--akin to those created by the non-linear thinkers: Tolkien and Blake.
After reading "The Red Season," I am left impressed, satisfied, pricked with curiosity, and sufficiently primed for the next episode. Bravo, Roz.
I've known Roz (the author) for many years, so I agreed to read her book out of kindness, not expecting it to be my kind of thing - my usual reading list is programming books, Scalzi, Heinlein Pratchett etc. So I read the book, and fully expected to put some vaguely worded 'it's great' review to make her happy...
BUT... I was hooked! The story grabbed me also immediately, as did the writing style. I honestly did not expect to enjoy it much. I expected to find it interesting and well written, but not enjoyable. However, the writing is fantastic and really advances the story. I ended up reading it through in one sitting and found myself wanting immediately to know what happened next upon reaching the end of the episode.
From talking to Roz, I understand that book publishers liked the book but didn't know where to place it in their line-up. My response to this: they're idiots! It's fantastic.
Now, as I'm a friend of Roz, I could be taken as being slightly partial... In this case, I'm not. My honest opinion of this book is that it's fantastic and a very enjoyable read; for comparison, I believe the closest thing in 'feel' that people who may not be familiar with Roz's writing would be "The Time Traveller's Wife". Now, that ended up selling a whole bunch and being turned into a movie... That's something I'd LOVE to see happen to this - and it's most certainly deserving (and has the quality to do so with great success).
Roz Morris lives in London. From the earliest age she had a compulsion to express herself on the page. Let out of London university, she was soon working as a journalist and writing novels. You'll have seen her books on the bestseller lists but not under her name because she ghostwrote them for other people. She is now coming into the daylight with novels of her own. She is represented by Piers Blofeld at Sheil Land and by Jane Conway-Gordon.
Her first novel under her own name is My Memories of a Future Life. She is also the author of a writing series, Nail Your Novel.
If you want to get to know her a little better, drop in at www.rozmorris.wordpress.com and her blog www.nailyournovel.com - where she keeps a regular diary of challenges she's tackling in her writing.
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?