One of the things a good book can do is give the reader an entirely new perspective. On an obvious level that can mean seeing the world through a particular character’s eyes, but there are other ways to give someone a new outlook.
The wonderful 100,000 Birthdays by Cynthia Rogerson will change your frame of reference just by reading. The American author is based in the Scottish Highlands and has a handful of award-winning novels under her belt as well as a highly original memoir. This latest book falls somewhere between those two stools – part-fictional memoir, part-philosophical musing and part-ode to the universe and all the life it contains.
If it sounds ambitious, 100,000 Birthdays certainly is, but it wears that ambition very lightly in a narrative as fun as it is profound. The book is described on the cover as “a novel about all of us” and dedicated to the author’s “four quad-trillion ancestors. Thanks guys,” which gives you some idea of the tone inside the covers. The action switches between a memoir written in a very lively and self-deprecating tone, and a look back some three-and-a-half-billion years to when life was first appearing on Earth.
Rogerson handles these two threads with aplomb and creates resonances and echoes between them as she goes, always keeping the reader entertained. There is a lot of science in here – chemistry, biology, evolution and much more – but it’s delivered so warmly that the mind-blowing facts of all of our existence are efficiently and heart-warmingly delivered.
There is so much going on in this narrative that it’s hard to express in a short review, but it’s a genuinely eye-opening read, as well as being deeply emotional and very funny. It says on the back cover that this book is for fans of Bill Bryson and Carl Sagan, and 100,000 Birthdays absolutely deserves to sit next to such illustrious literary company.
100,000 Birthdays by Cynthia Rogerson is out now (Sparsile Books, £10.99). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.
