An Element of Choice

This book comprises four stories on the theme of deception. In the title story, an old man who is terrified of dying is helped by four strange women to reincarnate into a new life. Experiencing intermittent flashbacks from his first life, he determines to be stronger and not repeat the same mistakes he made then. The England into which he is reborn is one in which the Nazis had won the Second World War, and he flees to France to escape the oppressive culture. There he realises that his is indeed a second life, and he has a vision of his first life, one of domestic drudgery, He abandons his girlfriend and returns to England, where he meets a woman who reveals to him where he was initially meant to be reborn, a planet in the Sirius system. The four strange women he'd met were Sirians bent on harvesting his cells as part of a planetary regeneration, but his blood was found to be defective. He is returned to Nazi England, where he makes a fortune by patenting technology he saw on the Sirian planet.