Tuesday 1 November 2016

Four Chambers by John Henry Winter


Four Chambers by John Henry Winter
Published by Long Fox Press in August 2014.

Where to buy this book:
Buy the ebook from Amazon.comAmazon.co.uk

How I got this book:
Downloaded ebook from Amazon

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Many things happened today and Amit wondered why.... What if a billion years passes in the blink of an eye? What happens to yesterday when tomorrow dawns? There are possibilities and there are probabilities and you will already know they are not the same thing. Amit knows. He pays close attention to that sort of thing. On the cusp of completing his research an unexpected configuration has appeared. No matter how hard he tries to ignore it, the image refuses to leave. Meanwhile, a sniper targets journalists visiting an Afghan market, a cruise ship sinks in the Arctic Ocean and a young boy struggles with his first piano composition. With his orderly schedule thrown into disarray, Amit searches with increasing desperation for the meaning behind the configuration. Is it linked to the events elsewhere? What does the man in the blue suit really want? Why on earth has his wife told Clara?
Four Chambers is an ambiguous tale of timeless connections and atomic entanglement. It is a story of four individuals linked by forces in existence since the birth of the universe; of time and distance, speed and location. Ultimately, Four Chambers is a story of love. A story of love, energy and the immortality that exists within us all. Because when we stop moving it is just possible we may live forever.

I'm going to describe Four Chambers as an 'onion' of a book and I hope you'll bear with me while I explain why. It's not because reading it made my eyes water! I discovered this novella through a BooksGoSocial newsletter a couple of months ago and was intrigued by its synopsis. Four well told but initially disparate tales are slowly revealed to have unexpected links and this is where my onion analogy comes in. I soon realised that, despite its short length, Four Chambers is not a quick read. It's four individual characters' stories are straightforward enough, but to simply understand their situations misses out a lot of Four Chambers' meaning. It's the seemingly innocuous connections that made this work fascinating for me and the more I spotted, the more engrossed I become in the book and the more I had to mull over between finishing reading it and writing this review.

There is an interesting interview with Winter on the Long Fox Press website in which he talks about quantum physics being his inspiration. Don't worry if you're not a physicist! I'm a 'likes watching Big Bang Theory' level scientist myself and (think) I understood Four Chambers just fine so potential readers don't need a degree. However the quantum ideas of widely separated events or actions being linked in bizarre ways is what drives this novella and Winters' interpretation of this makes for an unusual and thoughtful read.


Search Lit Flits for more:
Books by John Henry Winter / Novellas / Books from England

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