Life After Life
The global bestseller, now a major BBC series
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4.0 • 151 Ratings
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
The PRIZE-WINNING BESTSELLER, now a major BBC1 DRAMA SERIES starring Thomasin McKenzie, Sian Clifford and James McArdle, directed by BAFTA award-winning John Crowley.
'Dazzling, witty, moving, joyful, mournful, profound... one of the best novels I've read this century' Gillian Flynn, bestselling author of GONE GIRL
'A box of delights ... it grips the reader's imagination on the first page and never lets go.' HILARY MANTEL, author of THE MIRROR AND THE LIGHT
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What if you had the chance to live your life again and again, until you finally got it right?
During a snowstorm in England in 1910, a baby is born and dies before she can take her first breath.
During a snowstorm in England in 1910, the same baby is born and lives to tell the tale.
What if there were second chances? And third chances? In fact an infinite number of chances to live your life? Would you eventually be able to save the world from its own inevitable destiny? And would you even want to?
Life After Life follows Ursula Todd as she lives through the turbulent events of the last century again and again. With wit and compassion, Kate Atkinson finds warmth even in life's bleakest moments, and shows an extraordinary ability to evoke the past. Here she is at her most profound and inventive, in a novel that celebrates the best and worst of ourselves.
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'Merging family saga with a fluid sense of time and an extraordinarily vivid sense of history at its most human level. A dizzying and dazzling tour de force' Daily Mail
'Absolutely brilliant...it reminded me a bit of her first book Behind the Scenes at the Museum, which is one of my most favourite books ever.' Marian Keyes, author of Rachel, Again
'An exceptional writer' Guardian
'[A] magnificently tender and humane novel' Observer
'A ferociously clever writer...a big, bold novel that is enthralling, entertaining' New Statesman
'Exceptionally captivating' New York Times
'Truly brilliant...Think of Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife or David Nicholl's One Day.. a rare book that you want to start again the minute you have finished.' The Times
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
One of our favourite novels of 2013 sees British writer Atkinson leaving her familiar niche of witty mysteries to tackle an ambitiously original novel about the many lives—and deaths—of her protagonist, Ursula Todd. Todd’s varying fates provide an outlet for Atkinson to explore 20th-century history and modern women’s experiences. Like a literary merry-go-round, Life After Life is dizzying but very fun.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Atkinson's new novel (after Started Early, Took My Dog) opens twice: first in Germany in 1930 with an English woman taking a shot at Hitler, then in England in 1910 when a baby arrives, stillborn. And then it opens again: still in 1910, still in England, but this time the baby lives. That baby is Ursula Todd, and as she grows up, she dies and lives repeatedly. Watching Atkinson bring Ursula into the world yet again initially feels like a not terribly interesting trick: we know authors have the power of life and death. But as Ursula and the century age, and war and epidemic and war come again, the fact of death, of "darkness," as Atkinson calls it, falling on cities and people now Ursula, now someone else, now Ursula again turns out to be central. At heart this is a war story; half the book is given over to Ursula's activities during WWII, and in its focus on the women and civilians usually overlooked or downplayed, it gives the Blitz its full measure of terror. By the end, which takes us back to that moment in 1930 and beyond, it's clear that Atkinson's not playing tricks; rather, through Ursula's many lives and the accretion of what T.S. Eliot called "visions and revisions," she's found an inventive way to make both the war's toll and the pull of alternate history, of darkness avoided or diminished, fresh.
Customer Reviews
Hypnotic, Thought Provoking
What if? Written very well and kept you engaged as you re-lived Ursula's life.
Good read
At first I had a hard time reading it and adjusting to the time slips, but once I got into it I couldn't put it down. Very week crafted. The only let down was the ending, bit of an anticlimax that seemed to undermine the whole intention of the book. Still worth the read however.
Interesting...
I thought this was going to be a reincarnation type of plot but it is more a sliding doors. I often had to go back and forth but overall enjoyed it. It's one of those books that's hard to define and I'll be careful who I recommend it too. Kate Atkinson however does write beautifully and in anyone else's hands this would have been a flop.