Life After Life

Kate Atkinson is one of my favourite authors, with a voice that really resonates with me.

This is a ‘what if’ novel that really sets you thinking. It’s witty and stylish, and yet it also tugs at your heartstrings. A roller-coaster ride that had me on the edge of my seat.

If ever there was a novel that deserved to be called a “tour de force,” this is it.

Atkinson’s heroine Ursula Todd dies and is reborn in several parallel existences that reflect how the smallest choices can alter the arc of a life and even the course of history itself. The novel opens with Ursula assassinating Hitler and then plunges her backward and forward in time through two world wars, ending in the 1960s.

This book began like a narrative poem with a constant, urgent refrain from a soul born and lost in infancy then later in childhood and again in young adulthood.

A soul born and lost, over and over, until finally, she manages to push her way into this world and survive. A soul with a mission from beyond whose urgency is immediate and critical. A mission that simply could not wait for another time, because without it, time itself was at risk.

For me, Life After Life is a book of significant genius. It represents Deus ex Machina—the hand of… show more.

Kate Atkinson must be my favourite author (up there with Jane Austen).

I highly recommend all and any of her novels as her characters are all at odds with the world. She writes strong women well, (even in her tales of P.I. Jackson Brody).

Her stunning novel Life After Life is not only structured around the different parallel lives of her main character Ursula growing up before and then during WWII, but also because it tackles that age-old question i.e. ‘If you could go back in time would you kill Hitler?’

Ursula Todd is a wonderful main character and the… show more.

This story is about an upper-middle-class English family who is caught up in the events of WW2. The domestic details are fascinating including the kinds of puddings served. (I love puddings). Where this story differs is that Ursula, the heroine, has to keep reliving parts of her life until she ‘gets it right’. I could not stop thinking about Ursula for a long time. I was so impressed by how the story did not follow any normal pattern but demonstrated the power and flexibility wielded by the author. Kate Atkinson also attached a Pinterest page to her website. The visuals… show more.

Amongst my favourite books—in my top twenty perhaps—Life After Life is a sweeping drama that spans both World Wars and centres on Ursula, a girl who grows up in a lively dynamic family, as world events spin around her. The book asks the question what if we could have more than one chance at life? How would the world change if we hadn’t been born? Structurally complex, Life After Life is so well written it draws you along and absorbs you with its wonderful characterization of Ursula and her family, so much so that you fully accept the alternative… show more.

Ursula Todd first dies at birth on Feb. 11, 1910, when a snowstorm in the English countryside delays the doctor. But in this looping story of second chances and altered outcomes, the rule-breaking narrative rewinds, and she survives the birth thanks to the doctor’s timely arrival. A few years later, she dies again. And again and again, only to be each time re-spawned, like a video game player with a vague awareness of the need to make better choices next time. Kate Atkinson’s wildly ambitious novel full of endless failures and rebirths illustrates how small decisions can dramatically affect our… show more.

A clever, playful, moving novel that is not strictly about civilians in war, but which has their experiences at its heart. It tells and retells the lives of Ursula Todd, whose life begins again each time she dies. In several of these lives Ursula volunteers as an Air Raid Warden in blitzed London, and in another, she (having married unwisely to a German man in the 1930s) tries to keep her daughter alive in a devastated Berlin.  ‘Spanish Flu’ repeatedly devastates Ursula’s family, reminding us that victims of the pandemic were among the dead of war. Atkinson clearly spent time… show more.

The premise of this novel is the variety of different ways that a single life can turn out—assuming it survives its own birth, that is. This isn't initially the case for the main character Ursula Todd who, in the first version of her life at least, is stillborn. Her life repeats itself again and again, however, ending suddenly and then restarting, to unfold with sometimes minor and sometimes major changes. As a writer, I get a headache just imagining the level of planning required to construct such an intricate novel, but Atkinson does it perfectly. The scenes about the Spanish… show more.

Is this book about Time-Travel or Dimension-Jumping? Or about someone who’s freakishly aware of their rebirth into numerous lives? I don’t know— but I do know that it’s a breathtakingly audacious, witty, intelligent, brilliant book.

It recounts the life of Ursula Todd, born in 1910. She then lives, well, Life After Life. Some are very short: she is still-born or drowns as a child. Others, as she seems to cycle through almost every life it is possible for her to have lived, involve considerable suffering. She becomes dimly aware of these numerous lives and learns, to an extent, to… show more.