Life After Life

Kate Atkinson

Doubleday

The question posed on the cover of Life after Life asks: ‘What if you had the chance to live your life again and again, until you finally got it right?’ Kate Atkinson’s bold and inventive novel turns on this central question, following Ursula Todd from her birth in a snowstorm in London in 1910 through the tumultuous events of the first half of the 20th century, with the Blitz in London as its cornerstone. Pledged a series of lives in the novel, Ursula Todd is given a new set of circumstances in each of them: in each she can seek to live a better life, protect the people she loves and redeem her past mistakes. But can she and does she? This is an immensely clever, thought-provoking and completely absorbing novel. It is hard to put it down and yet it is sometimes difficult to understand what it is really about. You can read it in your own way though and find in it infinite layers of meaning.