This Rec League comes from Leigh. Thanks, Leigh!
Amanda: There’s a Kresley Cole, Dreams of a Dark Warrior. A Valkyrie’s berserker warrior lover is doomed to die every time he remembers his lady love.I recently re-read an old (though a bit dated) favorite of mine, Finding Laura by Kay Hooper, and it reminded me how much I like the “eternal soul mates” trope: love that happens over and over again through time. It’s not time travel, just two souls who keep meeting, falling in love, living lives, then being reincarnated and fated to meet again, over and over. Another example is This Time For Keeps by Kathleen Kane (aka Maureen Child) or, movie-wise, Om Shanti Om and a little bit Dead Again. (Although a small nod to the idea also appears in Susanna Kearsley’s The Winter Sea, also a favorite). Do you have any other examples of this kind of romance? I’d love more books but I’d take movies, too!
Carrie: A Knight in Shining Armor by Judith Devereaux ( A | BN | K | G | AB )
Sarah: Definitely Kearsley… Nicola Cornick – The Phantom Tree sort of…which is more time slip than fated through time but it fits.
Heads up for terrible fatphobia in A Knight in Shining Armor.
Nicola Cornick’s books might also fit the Kearsley style desire but again, time slip isn’t quite the same as fated through time.
EllenM: I actually have a few for this!! First, there was a brief time when this trope was HUGE in YA romance so I have a couple recommendations along that line. The Archers of Avalon trilogy by Chelsea Fine ( A | BN | K | AB ) is a pretty fun indie YA romance trilogy that uses this trope although be forewarned it has a love triangle with brothers which I know some people haaaaaate.
The Melissa De La Cruz YA vampire romance series Blue Bloods ( A | BN | K | AB ) also has the fated lovers through reincarnation as a major element of the world-building, though not between the hero and heroine. I enjoyed the first few books in college–they have a very CW-esque supernatural soap-y feel–but I did not finish the series so I can’t give a verdict.
This is also an element of A Witch in Time by Constance Sayers. I really did not enjoy it (see my review) but I know other people have liked it and if this trope is big for you, you might fare better.
I’m also pretty sure the book Anne Brashares wrote after Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants uses this trope but I’m not sure if it’s a romance as I haven’t read it. I think it’s called My Name Is Memory. ( A | BN | K | AB )
Another one I can think of that may be relevant is the Archetype sci-fi duology by MD Waters which while it is not directly the same trope it kind of plays with the same ideas of love after/through death in the same way.
Sarah: My gosh Ellen way to go !
Shana: Ellen to the rescue!
EllenM: I don’t think I actually like this trope very much but for some reason I have read many books with it.
Which books would you recommend? Let us know in the comments!
I love Dead Again.
The only books that come to mind for me are pretty iffy recommendations but here they are:
Night Embrace by Sherrilyn Kenyon, which is the second Dark Hunters book. This is early 2000s paranormal, and I haven’t read it since I was a teenager more than 10 years ago. I strongly suspect there are things that did not age well, but I don’t remember it well enough to say if/what. The only thing I actually remember is that the heroine is the hero’s reincarnated soul mate. (And they specifically say “soul mate” – they being Eros and Psyche, who are part of the world’s mythology.) He is not reincarnated because he is immortal, so this is sort of half the requested trope?
The other is Remembrance by Jude Deveraux, which I learned about in the comments of a Help A Bitch Out post (pretty sure it wasn’t the answer, just a mention of a similar book to try). I have not actually read more than the first couple chapters in the excerpt, so this rec is even shakier. And it is even older than the Kenyon, so there’s that. From what I can gather, a romance writer becomes fixated on her fictional hero and discovers from a psychic that she is remembering her past life love, then she gets hypnotized through time and has to fix what went wrong between the two of them in previous incarnations. This one does seem to be two people who keep falling in love over and over, but it goes wrong for them because they messed it up somehow. I think.
Sorry I don’t have more reliable suggestions.
OK, no idea why this wasn’t the first thing to spring to mind, but also Kelley Armstrong’s Cainsville series. Maybe because it’s fantasy with a major romantic subplot rather than romance. The world building involves fae. The premise is that the protagonist is reincarnated repeatedly along with two others in a love triangle. The various versions of the three of them aren’t always reincarnated at the same time, may not meet each other, and the versions of the heroine don’t always fall in love with the same man. The heroine has visions of the reincarnations over lots of time periods. There are two fae factions who gain power if the heroine sides with them, and they treat the men as proxies since they think she will be more likely to pick them if she loves “their” representative. Any more would probably be spoilers. These characters are not always comfortable with knowing they have previous lives, and they are very against the idea of those previous lives determining their futures. So this may not be the right kind of story. But I can wholeheartedly recommend it, so there’s that.
The first that came to mind was Remembrance from Jude Deveraux, already mentionned, but I want to add: I haven’t read it since it came out, but I remember the heroine, a romance novelist, talking about her readers and how great and intelligent they were. That was the first time I felt vindicated as a romance reader (it was still something shameful back then) and it was a great feeling.
The short story “Lake of Dreams” by Linda Howard is based on this trope.
There’s also ARCHANGEL’S BLADE by Nalini Singh, Dmitri ans Honor’s story. They do not relive again and again, which would be hard with Dmitri being a vampire and all ;-), but there’s an eternal lover trope in there.
Three books by Jewel E. Ann: TRANSCEND, EPOCH, and FORTUITY, collectively called the Transcend series. The first two books have to be read together because they tell a continuous story; FORTUITY is more of a standalone, although it features characters from the earlier books. However, I think it’s best to read all three books in order. It starts when a young woman realizes she knows very specific things about the life of the widowed man whose daughter she babysits—things that happened to him years before the young woman was born—and the story plays out from there.
It’s been long tome since I read it, but I think Nora Robert’s novel, Midnight Bayou, has a lovers reincarnated plot line. And in Sharan Lee and Steve Miller’s Liaden series there are some short stories about a previous incarnation of one of the main couples in the main storyline of the series.
There’s a fair amount of fan-fic that has this (or other kinds) of soulmate themes, although I can’t think of any reincarnation ones off the top of my head. And although Yusuf/Nicolo in ‘The Old Guard’ (Netflix) don’t quite fit this theme as they’re immortal, I would consider them eternal soulmates (and it’s just a good movie in general!)
There was a big fantasy series (maybe 16 or so books?) by Katherine Kerr called The Deverry Cycle that started coming out in the mid-1980’s, where people are reincarnated over and over and repeatedly come together with the same people. If I recall correctly – it’s been a very long time since I read these – sometimes the relationship between the same parties is romantic, sometimes not, and genders flip from incarnation to incarnation as well.
I lost track of the series before it finished, and I can’t say how well it holds up after all these years, but I’ve thought about these books and the reincarnation premise a lot over the years. I think I’ll give it another go.
There are a kajillion examples of this trope in Chinese and Korean media (TV shows, web novels, etc.); I won’t vouch for the quality of each example, but they’re all over the place. The C-drama Eternal Love (on Netflix now) is the first one that comes to mind, and Love and Destiny is another C-drama that subverts the whole trope.
Okay. I never do this because it just feels weird to me but what the hey. The first series of books I sold for publication are all rooted in the reincarnation/fated lovers trope. FAERIE FATE, FAERIE FIRE, FAERIE FOOL, and FAERIE FAITH. They’re a blend of Irish mythology and reincarnation with past and present both covered. If you happen to be interested, you can get more information here: https://wp.me/P1tyzr-1q End of commercial message. I’m retiring back into my “Feeling Weird” Cave now.
YSABEL by Guy Gavriel Kay uses this trope, although it functions as the mystery in the contemporary story, includes a triangle, and ends badly every time. The backflashes of the love affairs are set in various time periods in France, primarily in the south, and the past lives are mostly shown as short remembrances. The bits of history tie into a separate story set in Provence (IIRC) as the modern main characters work with the lovers (separately) to solve the mystery of why they keep coming back. The settings for each remembrance were marvelous.
It is a wonderful, intense, complicated book with lovely writing and a logical ending. It has been years since I read it, but the book set me on the path of reading all of Kay’s work which are all absolutely wonderful, intense, and complicated.
“The short story “Lake of Dreams” by Linda Howard is based on this trope.” < came here to say this. I love this story. It was originally in an anthology and it's now available as a standalong at Amazon for $1.99
FERNEY by James Long. They keep meeting across time but are not always of the right age or situation for each other.
Perhaps The Lake House with Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves, which is I believe based on a Korean movie.
Wasn’t The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffeneger a bit like this? I read it a very long time ago and almost luxuriated in the unfolding of the story…until I hated the ending.
Once again I find myself firing up the WABAC Machine for the grandmother of this trope: Anya Seton’s THE GREEN DARKNESS. I still have my original paperback found in a bag o’ books from my Grandmother. Lots of people say KATHERINE is their favorite Seton, but THE GREEN DARKNESS, that’s my go to. Seton’s meticulous research and her beautiful writing makes her a remarkably timeless read, or as one reviewer put it:
Who else would take the horrific discovery of a girl walled up alive in an English castle and recast it as a tragic time-travel romance between a monk and a noble’s bastard daughter?
Anya Seton did, and, in 1972, Green Darkness became her most popular novel by far, spending six months on The New York Times bestseller list. It wasn’t simply Seton’s deft touch with historical facts woven into the tale of forbidden love; she added an element of reincarnation that made it even more irresistible to the denizens of the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.
side note: also where I learned about priest holes.
ACK!
There’s a book I read probably thirty years ago with this trope, and it’s a HABO for me.
Two people are working an archaeological dig in the Mediterranean somewhere and they turn out to be reincarnations of a tragic couple who died in the same place two thousand or more years ago. He was a priest and she was a priestess (possibly of different mythologies. I want to say it’s Cretan v mainland Greece) and the bits I remember are that she ends up being sacrificed by her angry high priest by being loaded with chains and forced to jump into a sacred pool, that the hero both times looks the same including a hunchback, and that they find the original hero’s body propped up on a sacred (double bladed?) axe that he’s impaled himself on and just before the body crumbles to dust they see the resemblance between the heroes.
Of course, it was a Readers Digest Condensed Book, so I may be remembering wrong.
I have always loved this trope, but I don’t have any romance recommendations. Susanna Kearsley has done a bunch of variations on this idea that might or might not work. I can suggest a couple of good kids books, though.
@DonnaMarie: GREEN DARKNESS was probably one of the most influential books I ever read and reread, all those decades ago. And probably partly as a result, I’m going to echo @Silver James here and toot my own horn: SECOND SIGHT is out this week and it fits the Rec League to a T: an British officer and a colonial young woman fall in love and meet once more in contemporary suburban DC. It will make you cry tears of sorrow and joy – I promise!
Re movies: Dead Again was fantastic, but so was Somewhere in Time, with Christopher Reeve, Jane Seymour, and Christopher Plummer. To this day it can make me disolve in tears.
I’ve read many books over the years with elements of this but am having trouble remembering specifics.
I think Kristen Ashley has something of this in her Ghosts and Reincarnation series.
There’s an old Barbra Streisand movie, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, that has a twist on this.
I liked the m/m romance Any Given Lifetime
by Leta Blake in which one character is born with all the memories of his past life and must wait to grow up in order to reconnect with the (now older) man he loves.
A book that stuck with me a looooonng time is ” Lady of Hay ” by Barbra Erskine. Set in the 1980’s, a journalist is investigating hypnotic regression. I loved and hated this book ! It has 4 stars on goodreads. Your mileage may vary.
Came to recommend two older books already mentioned, Green Darkness by Anya Seton and Lady of Hay by Barbara Erskine.
The latter has NOT aged well since 1985 however, I hated the controlling sexist hero. It’s a spooky/horror in places romance, and CW the hero does hurt the heroine physically and mentally (tries to kill her) while possessed by the spirit of his past life self. And the past life story is based on a true historical event but it’s a lot. Still, a memorable book for sure.
BellaInAus’s your book reminded me of something (although I don’t think it’s the same book).
The Court of the Three Sisters by Marianne Willman. It’s a historical romance where three sisters go on a dig with their archeologist father in Greece. I think there is a love story for all three sisters, but I seem to remember the main character (Summer) has a love story that has some element of reincarnation. The main thing I remember is that the heroine was disabled and I felt like it was handled fairly well for back in the day (it’s possible that it has *not* aged well) and that there were scenes with the Fates weaving the sisters’ futures that I enjoyed. It was the first romance I read ever (!) and I remember it very fondly even it hasn’t held up well.
It came out in 1994, so time-wise it might fit, but the heroine has the disability, not the hero.
It definitely fits the reincarnation theme, although I think this might be hinted at more than discovered by the character. I actually had forgotten that aspect till now.
Oh, another one I thought of is Celtic Maidens by Ceri Norman. It’s set in Wales and involves stone circles and Druids, I enjoyed it.
And the Ann Brashares YA one that Ellen mentioned, it doesn’t end with an HEA but the sequel was never written, although I believe the author has now started working on it.
Remembrance was the only one that stuck out in my mind.
Barbara Erskine has several books with this theme. I remember reading them in the 90s and really enjoying them. But I agree with LisaS that these books probably don’t stand up over time.
The archeological dig in the Mediterranean sounds like it could be Lady of the Labyrinth by Caroline Llewellyn. It’s been a long time since I’ve read the book (*ahem* 90s), but the description made me think of that book. Although the Goodreads description sounds completely different.
The first that came to mind is the Vanyel trilogy by Mercedes Lackey (technically the Last Herald Mage trilogy). It is YA m/m fantasy and the reincarnation trope works very well. And of course the angst, oh the angst.
I thought of an old favorite that might work ~ Dream Walker by Jacqueline Marten.
Oh my gosh, thank you all so much! I am so excited to see authors I have never heard of before, and new TV dramas too! This is truly the best community!
@Jeannette – I will second that I LOVED Vanyel’s trilogy by Mercedes Lackey — I think probably reading it as a teen shaped part of why I love reincarnation as a trope so much 🙂
@Meg Napier — I also love Somewhere in Time but it broke my heart so hard I watched it once and will never watch it again! Just thinking about it makes me tear up!
@BellaInAus that book sounds amazing and right up my alley! I hope you find it soon!
Just chiming in for “On A Clear Day, You Can See Forever”. It’s adjacent to the trope and a lot of fun. I do not like sad and agree about “Somewhere in Time”. Stupid penny.
One of the Jude Devereaux’s mentioned earlier broke me. It ends happyish but the things the past life characters went through was so angsty that I haven’t read another JD since then.
Gini Koch’s Alien series has a bit of the trope, but it is not the focus of the story or the characters.
Demon Angel by Meljean Brook might work.
Back again after spending hours searching for this book: FERNEY by James Long. I keep a log of books I’ve read, and I read this one in 2008, but it made such a vivid impression that I can still feel the chills it left.
While searching, I came across THE NONSUCH LURE, by Mary Luke, which was published in in 1976. I (gulp) probably read it not too long after that and kept the copy all these years. They’re both rock-solid souls-united-throughout-incarnations stories.
The Succubus series of 6 books by Richelle Mead came to my mind. Georgina is an immortal Succubus who was unfaithful to her husband while still mortal – this is what leads to her becoming a Succubus. She loves a number of men throughout her long life, and discovers they have all been reincarnations of her husband, her soul mate. She eventually wins an appeal in a court in Hell to become mortal again and live with her soul mate Seth. I really enjoyed them, not only for the romance but also her interesting collection of friends and fellow immortals.
@BellaInAus: My first thought was the 1990s Suzanne Frank 4-book series that begins with REFLECTIONS IN THE NILE, but there isn’t an archeological dig. Instead our modern day heroine finds herself cast back in time (each book further back) and the hero goes with her but she had to find him each time. That’s my recollection. Anyone else read these?
Mariana by susannah kearsley. Also the film dead again
Not a romance bu Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life. I also feel like Daphne duMaurier’s The House on the Strand is at least adjacent. Can’t remember if it is more time travel-y or reincarnation or a little of both.
And Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander?
I think that the book about the archeological dig in the Mediterranean might be The Sea King’s Daughter, by Barbara Michaels (also writing as Elizabeth Peters). I am not sure that it will hold up. I think that I read it in the 90s and it seemed a little dated then, although I have liked the reincarnation/spooky echoes of the past trope, since I read Green Darkness as a teenager (in the 70s). I read Lady of Hay on a return flight from a business trip (back in the 90s, when I carried a paperback or two with me everywhere) and I remember being annoyed when we landed, because I didn’t want to stop reading and drive home! I think that Erskine wrote some other books with similar themes, but I don’t recall the names or the plots very well.
The Eight, by Katherine Neville, is another book that comes to mind. It is set in 1970s during the OPEC crisis with parts set during and after the French Revolution. It features a chess set supposedly owned by Charlemagne and has lots of real life historical characters, who pop up throughout the parts set during the French revolution.
Dreams 1 and 2 by Jayne Ann Krentz.
Read and loved the Suzanne Frank books!
Elswyth Thane’s Williamsburg Series (from the 40’s-50’s) starts with a couple during the revolutionary period. The 7th book, in the World War II period, is about a couple who turn out to be the reincarnations of the first couple. I read those when I was a teen, and I remember them very fondly
REBORN YESTERDAY by Tessa Bailey has a touch of this. I wasn’t blown away by the book, but it was cute enough.
There’s an anthology by Mary Balogh that has a story that might work? The novella is called The North Tower in the anthology No Ordinary Love. The heroine inherits an old castle provided she marries an Earl but while she’s there she has this experience where she becomes another woman and lives out her love story from 100 years previous of falling in love with another man. Sort of reminiscent of reincarnated lovers.
YA novels – the Fallen Series by Lauren Kate. About two angels who are reunited only to be parted again every 17 years.