Touch

I really enjoyed this book. I bought this immediately after reading the author's first novel, "The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August", which I absolutely loved.The premise is rock solid and very unique. The book takes place in our world with the addition of people who can become "ghosts" - they can transfer their consciousness from the body they're currently inhabiting to another by touching skin. The author does a fantastic job exploring every nuance of this premise through following the first person lens of a long lived ghost. She explores a huge range of Really Big Questions: What makes us human? What is beauty? What is love? What is the purpose of human life/existence? These are just a few that the author touches on.The characterizations are really wonderful throughout the novel. The protagonist (who we never really discover the name of) reveals more and more facets of its personality as the story goes on. I say "its" because we also never find out the original gender of the entity that is called Kepler, which itself is another question raised by the author - if you can effortlessly switch bodies and genders, does the original gender of a consciousness really matter after decades or centuries of life as both? The ultimate antagonist is chillingly rendered. In fact, there were a few scenes that I was really uncomfortable reading because of just how alien and terrible that one is rendered by the author, it was that well done.The overall plot was both simple and complex. Simple in that basically the protagonist has an attempt on her life at the start of the book, searches for the ultimate source of this attempt, and ultimately confronts it. Complex in that this narrative is peppered throughout with glimpses of the protagonist's past experiences, giving insights into both the nature of a "ghost" entity and Kepler's formation in particular. And also complex because, again, the author really explores the ramifications of an entity who can switch bodies so easily, and the daily life of a ghost is really very alien with just a few moments of commonality with our own lives.There are really just two reasons I don't give this one 5 stars. The first is that I had a hard time identifying with the protagonist, because unlike some of the other ghosts we meet in the novel, he/she/it never shows a core identity of consciousness that we can come to know as a character. Throughout the entire novel, almost every time someone calls it by "Kepler" it says "don't call me that". It always identifies itself as the name of whatever body it's currently inhabiting, completely subsuming any self identity by the identity of it's current host. I know this is intentional by the author, exploring another question: if you end up switching bodies hundreds and thousands of times over decades and centuries, what defines your self identity? Or put another way, how much of most people's sense of self is defined by their physical body vs. more intangible qualities? Or even more subtly, how much does our physical body influence our other intangible qualities? (e.g. if you tend to be naturally fit, does this lead to you being hard working, or is that independent?) But even though I know this is intentional, it left me really struggling to completely identify with the protagonist. Just the fact that I can't even give a real name to it (or gender) makes it tough.The second reason for just 4 stars is that the ending left me a little wanting. Without giving anything away, I just felt like the last few pages were a little anticlimactic after what was a really wonderfully done climax. Again I think this was intentional on the part of the author to further illustrate the life of a ghost, but it was really unsatisfying for me personally.Overall, a very solid second entry by an author who I think will become a major name in science fiction and literature in general.

I'm not sure how to rate this book so I wentt with the middle rating. rI found this. Book to be rather odd & difficult to follow because its not a linial story, it jumps around a lot. I did stick with it to the end as parts were intriguing and I wanted to learn how it was to end. The idea of being able to inhabbit someone else's body at any time is an intereting one but extremely confusing. I have to say that there were many a moment while reading this that had me wondering about the author's state of mind.

Touch is one of the most fascinating books I’ve read this year. The idea behind Touch is that there exist “ghosts” who survive by possessing people’s bodies and transferring from body to body by touch. The narrator is one such ghost, who was beaten to death in an alleyway… but right before death gripped the shoulder of the attacker and thus lived on, in a new body.A couple hundred years later, the narrator has negotiated a deal with a woman named Josephine. The narrator gets the use of Josephine’s body for three months, and she gets ten thousand euros and a new start on life. Only, before the three months are up, Josephine is assassinated by a shadowy organization bent on destroying all ghosts. Instead of running, the narrator decides to go looking for the truth and to seek vengeance for her death.The narrator of Touch prefers to slip entirely inside the lives of the host bodies, taking both their names and genders and trying to construct a story of the body’s life. The narrator is never given a continuing gender, and all information about the original body is concealed, except for manner of death. The narrator is also nameless, although the shadowy organization calls them “Kepler.” The narrator (hence referred to as “Kepler” for convenience’s sake) tries to insist that they don’t have a self – they are which ever body they inhabit. Yet over the course of the book, Kepler does seem to come closer to admitting the truth that they exist as an individual, distinct from any of the lives they’ve stolen.Something else I really love about Touch is the moral ambiguity and how Kepler is not a very good person. They are accused of being a parasite, and this claim is never really refuted. They are a parasite – their entire existence relies upon stealing time from other people, sometimes up to years at a time. Instead of denying it, Kepler will try to say that they are better than others of their kind, or point to people like Josephine, who’s body they inhabited willingly. There’s moments in Touch when you realize just how horrifying Kepler’s manner of existing is – imagine waking up with time from your live gone and with no idea of what someone else has been doing with your body. But given the narrator, you see the story entirely through Kepler’s point of view, in which they try to paint themself as sympathetic. They will constantly try to justify their actions, but really they will do about anything to survive. And can you blame them for wanting to keep living? The entire process is fascinating and makes me want to reread the book at some point in the future.Touch is also very fast paced and incredibly gripping. It is not a short book, but I was driven to finish it in under twenty-four hours. Not only does Touch have an intriguing premise and some complex themes about identity and morality, it is also genuinely fun to read.I highly recommend Touch. It’s interesting and thrilling and by far one of the best new releases of 2015. I am so glad that I read it.

I was definitely one of those thrilled by `Claire North's' first book, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August. `North' is a third pen name for Catherine Webb, writing (since she was 14) YA books and, as Kate Griffin, fantasy novels for adults. `Harry August' fell into SF territory, so the North persona was created for that. And it was a wonderfully inventive novel which sucked me in from the off and didn't let go.So it was with great excitement that I started Touch. The premise of Harry August is that there are people who, through time, have been able to re-live their lives and times, alternate realities, bifurcating realities, and, because this has been the case since time immemorial, it is possible for such times-repeaters to meet each other in their times, and pass messages back and forth, so that an elderly, dying time-repeater in 2015 might meet a child, born in 2005, with a message from their life in 2060, which they are repeating in their own alternating universes - knowledge is passed back and forth, in this way.Touch has the premise that some kind of body-hopping ghosts, created, at the moment of generally violent, murderous deaths, can come free from their dying bodies and jump ship, by skin to skin contact, and use the bodies and lives of their `hosts' like houses. The `ghosts' do not die unless the bodies they inhabit die without the ghost being able to jump ship by skin to skin contact with someone else, before the host body dies.There is a similar premise as in Harry August, in that there are one group of people aware of this or with the power to do this, and another group of people, ditto, trying to stop them, for various reasons. So it's a ghost jumping fantasy version leading to a kind of entity shootout at the OK Corral. Many times.And this was my problem. With Harry August, sure there was a basic theme (the specific re-living of a life, with different choices, but the theme did not get in the way of any other factors which make up a novel - narrative drive, and, most importantly, character - individuals, strongly drawn, which the reader progressively gets to know. We really DID get to know August over his 15 lives. Unfortunately, in Touch the various `entities' - in this case, primarily the major entity of `Kepler', who over the course of this book probably occupies several hundred individuals, some for years, some for seconds, and his/her/its major adversary entity (not named here, in order to avoid spoilers) are leaping lives so frequently and dizzyingly that it becomes impossible (for this reader, at least) to particularly care about the entities, the lives, or who will win that entity shoot out. Or, I should say, the final entity shoot-out, as over the course of what felt like a very very long, albeit very fast-moving action novel, bloody kinds of shoot-outs and violence occur, like the jumping, again and again and again.I had the curious feeling, all the way through the novel, that all this endless jumping, endless which-side-will-win-and-what-tricks-and-feints-will-they-need-to-use-to-do-it, were all some kind of preface and preamble, and surely `the novel' would begin SOON. Harry August had been so assuredly done, that I couldn't believe North could have made something so predictable as this felt to be. I was on the verge of abandoning it, many many, times, but then the author would make an observation which kind of woke me up, and I thought `aha, NOW it begins, so I pressed on. That I did keep on somehow going, despite huge disappointment has to make me raise my rating to the unenthusiastic `OK'The ending, as in all OK Corral battles, will always have an inevitability, but the reader ought to have an investment in hoping/wanting one version of a possible ending rather than another. I'm afraid I had none, and went `oh, that' ; if the ending would have been different, I would also have thought `oh, that'Judicious and drastic editing might have prevented this reader feeling the journey was endless. This would have been a pretty intriguing novella or short novel, but stretched out to more than 400 pages it felt like a slog.

Some time ago, a colleague recommended another Claire North book, 'The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August' and I still hold it to be one of the best novels that I've ever read. So, upon seeing 'Touch' on my Kindle page, I didn't need any persuading to buy it. I was right; it's fantastic!As with other Claire North books, she takes a fairly simple, but physically impossible, concept and the uses it as the basis for a story that works on many different levels; a thriller, a love story, an exploration of human nature, an expose of prejudice etc. In 'The First Fifteen Lives ...' the concept is one of perpetual reincarnation. In 'Touch' the concept is that a sentient entity, with a mind and a memory but with no corporeal body, can occupy and take over any human with which it can make skin to skin contact. Once 'possessed', the human simply blanks out and wakes up, minutes, hours, days or years later, when the entity leaves it to move on to another body and the 'host' has no memory of anything that was done while the entity occupied its body. One of the things that makes this book so brilliant is the detail of the mechanics of how this possession works. The only thing that prevents the entity from living forever, simply moving into a new body when required, is that, if the host body dies while the entity remains in possession, then the entity dies too.As with other CN books, the basic concept isn't original. The 1998 film 'Fallen', starring Denzel Washington, has a very similar theme, with Washington playing a detective trying to catch a serial killer who is, actually, a demon called Azazel which can take control of any sentient body that it touches. What makes the CN novels stand out is the literary skill with which the ideas are conveyed.Here, the main character is referred to as 'Kepler' but, not only are we told that this is an invented name but we never even discover the gender of Kepler as all such entities, known as 'ghosts', occupy both male and female hosts indiscriminately. Kepler has existed for some 400 years and remembers everything of its experiences in hundreds of hosts.The tension required to power the thriller element comes from the conflict with a 'baddie' entity called 'Galileo'. Galileo has a penchant for taking control of a body and then making it do terrible things, including massacres of innocents before making the host kill itself as Galileo jumps to another body.. One of the strange things for me was that, while reading this book, the mass shooting in Las Vegas in which Stephen Paddock fired automatic weapons into a crowd at a concert, killing 58 and injuring 500 others, before killing himself; a real life event that mirrored, exactly, how Galileo operates in this fictional novel. The thriller element of the book concludes with the inevitable face-off between Kepler (good entity) and Galileo (badentity).But this book works on more than one level. By removing traditional concepts of gender or sexual attraction, this manages to tease out intriguing concepts of the nature of love. Kepler truly loves several of the bodies that he/she inhabits as well as a complex array of shades of love for others around him. When a 'host' falls in love with Kepler, given that Kepler occupies many bodies of all ages, genders and proclivities, it is a brilliant exploration of stripping appearance and gender from the concept of love.The end of this book gets just a little confusing, as the chase between two entities has them switching bodies with lightning speed, leaving the reader to catch up. In addition, there are a couple of details that remain unexplained; for example, it seems that, sometimes, one entity can recognize another entity, in whatever body it currently occupies while, at other times, this isn't possible. But these are very minor criticisms in what is, really, a genuine blockbuster of a book.I absolutely loved this book and I'll read more of Claire North's work.

"Touch" ist nach "The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August" das zweite Buch, das die Autorin unter dem Pseudonym Claire North veröffentlicht hat. Der Erstling hat mir im direkten Vergleich noch ein bisschen besser gefallen, aber auch "Touch" ist ziemlich gut.Wieder basiert die Geschichte auf einer originellen, ungewöhnlichen Ausgangssituation: Ich-Erzähler Kepler hat keinen eigenen Körper (mehr) und muss sich deshalb den anderer Menschen leihen. Es genügt eine Berührung, schon steckt er sprichwörtlich in der Haut eines anderen. Der eigentliche Eigentümer der jeweiligen menschlichen Hülle fällt währenddessen in eine Art Tiefschlaf. So hat er schon einige hundert Jahre in zig verschiedenen Körpern zugebracht - mal ist er alt, mal jung, mal männlich, mal weiblich. Als ein Killer auf ihn angesetzt wird, beginnt eine wilde Verfolgungsjagd quer durch Europa. Kepler weiß nicht, warum und von wem er gejagt wird - und seine Gegner wissen nie so genau, wie er gerade aussieht...Die eigentliche Handlung wird immer wieder von Keplers Erinnerungen an frühere Zeiten unterbrochen, so dass man nach und nach eine Vorstellung davon bekommt, wie so ein Leben ohne eigenen Körper aussehen könnte. Kepler übernimmt nicht nur die äußere Gestalt anderer Menschen, eine Zeitlang übernimmt er ihr gesamtes Leben - und lenkt es oft (teils bewusst, teils unbewusst) in Richtungen, auf die sie selbst wohl nie gekommen wären. Was für eine abstruse und gleichzeitig faszinierende Idee! Man fragt sich unweigerlich, was man wohl anstellen würde, wenn man für eine Weile ein anderer sein könnte.Wie schon der Vorgänger ist auch "Touch" sehr gut geschrieben. Trotz der mehr als ungewöhnlichen Ausgangssituation hatte ich überhaupt keine Mühe, mich in die Geschichte einzulesen. Anders als bei Ich-Erzählern üblich, ist Kepler als Person allerdings nie so richtig zu greifen - dafür hat er im Laufe der Zeit zu viele Menschen verkörpert (im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes!). Dennoch ist es faszinierend, ihn dabei zu begleiten, wie er seinen Verfolgern ein ums andere Mal entkommt. Die Geschichte ist teils nachdenklich und melancholisch, phasenweise auch sehr spannend und temporeich. Gegen Ende wird es etwas hektisch, und der Showdown am Schluss wurde für meinen Geschmack etwas zu lang ausgewalzt und lässt einige Fragen offen. Da mich das Buch bis dahin aber wirklich gut unterhalten hat, hat mich das nicht zu sehr gestört.Claire Norths dritter Roman soll in wenigen Monaten erscheinen; die Taschenbuchausgabe habe ich bereits vorbestellt. Eine sehr lesenswerte Autorin mit viel Fantasie und ungewöhnlichen Ideen!

I have read this novel twice now and it remains one of the best books I have read. The challenges Claire North sets herself in this plot could have created a horrible mess of a book but she pulls them all together to create something unique and compelling. The biggest potential problem is that the central character, Kepler, does not have a corporeal form but moves from body to body. So there is a danger you lose track of who the central protagonist is. But the transitions from body to body are handled brilliantly so you always know 'who' the character is. Each time Kepler has to adjust to a new physique and that can cause problems. But the plot device is actually liberating because Kepler can be so many different people. There is a short story with exactly this sort of plot - but I can't for the life of me remember who wrote it. I'm pretty sure it's a Jeremy Dyson story. As a novel this takes those ideas further, even though it's not strictly an original theme. The plot also explores the morality of 'hijacking' other people's bodies; is it parasitic even though the ghost often leaves the body better than they found it. For example, one slacker student is occupied for 30 years and when his ghost leaves him finds he is happily married, with children and very rich. But he has no memory of how he got there; as far as he is concerned no time has passed since he was taken over in his 20s. He actually wakes up in a hospital with cancer when his ghost abandons his dying body. This is her second novel (although there will be a Kindle-only story) and already some signature themes are emerging - as seen in The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August. There is the obvious device of the central character having multiple lives. But there is in both stories a threat in the form of someone with the same 'gift' who wants more and targets the central character in different guises. There is something of early Iain Banks in her stories and that's mean as a complement. I have read reviews saying that in both Claire North's novels you don't really 'know' the central character. But I disagree. Both Touch and 15 Lives are brilliant and imaginative.

I don’t believe that there is any such thing as perfection so I’m only giving this novel four stars out of five - but if the scale were out of ten I’d give it a nine. Out of a hundred I’d probably give it ninety five.I consider The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August to be amongst the most entertaining of the many books I’d read last year and this new novel by Claire North, although not quite on the same par, is certainly no disappointment either. Touch is an intelligent, superior, fast paced and exciting thriller.The premise is that some people, at the moment of their death, discover that their consciousness can jump into another person’s body simply by touching them. Such jumpers refer to themselves as Ghosts. Their hosts are utterly controlled by the Ghost until it departs, leaving the confused host no memory whatsoever of the time lost while they were possessed.Ghosts can jump from host to host as often as they want but always by touch. The only drawback to this seeming immortality is twofold. Firstly, if the host body dies with the Ghost in attendance then the Ghost will die too, and secondly is the inescapable guilt felt by some Ghosts because of the time they are forced to steal from their hosts – sometimes years of their lives.Tightly told in the first person, this is the story of a Ghost on the run, pursued inexplicably by a powerful and shadowy organisation who wishes to destroy it. This likeable Ghost has been around long enough to disregard its original name and gender; always comfortable with the identity and gender of the body it occupies.Our Ghost must find the people who are trying to kill it and discover their motives. This is an exciting, page turning chase story, detective story and spy thriller all rolled into one, examining throughout the concept of love, time and personal identity.