What if you could live again and again, until you got it right? On a cold and snowy night in 1910, Ursula Todd is born to an English banker and his wife. She dies before she can draw her first breath. On that same cold and snowy night, Ursula Todd is born, lets out a lusty wail, and embarks upon a life that will be, to say the least, unusual. For as she grows, she also dies, repeatedly, in a variety of ways, while the young century marches on towards its second cataclysmic world war. Does Ursula's apparently infinite number of lives give her the power to save the world from its inevitable destiny? And if she can -- will she?
Just finished reading this for the second time and it's every bit as good as I thought first time around. There's something very clever going on here as Kate Atkinson plays with multiple timelines and widely different versions of a single life, but the book never falls into the 'literary fiction trap' of being so clever that you don't care about the people who inhabit it. This goes on the list of books I'll read again and again.
A very complex, richly interwoven narrative that to date is my favourite of her novels. All of this is typically Kate Atkinson minute observation but the sections on the Blitz are both horrifying and gripping. A delight to read as she plays 'what if' on so many levels. Funny, tragic - the human comedy.
I’m sure Life After Life needs no introduction. Whilst everyone else is reading A God in Ruins, I thought it was about time I read its predecessor. I was glad that, for the most part, Ursula was unaware of her repeating life. She has feelings of déjà vu and often the sense that something awful is going to happen. This leads her to make different decisions. Sometimes things are fixed, sometimes they are not. She cannot make everything perfect in this imperfect world.
How such small events can make our lives change in dramatic ways. Some have described this book as dealing with time travel or reincarnation, but I like to think of it more exploring alternative realities, or as Terry Pratchett said, the trousers of time. In some of her lives, Ursula veers way off track, her life becoming tragic. In others, she seems happy and it is only …
I’m sure Life After Life needs no introduction. Whilst everyone else is reading A God in Ruins, I thought it was about time I read its predecessor. I was glad that, for the most part, Ursula was unaware of her repeating life. She has feelings of déjà vu and often the sense that something awful is going to happen. This leads her to make different decisions. Sometimes things are fixed, sometimes they are not. She cannot make everything perfect in this imperfect world.
How such small events can make our lives change in dramatic ways. Some have described this book as dealing with time travel or reincarnation, but I like to think of it more exploring alternative realities, or as Terry Pratchett said, the trousers of time. In some of her lives, Ursula veers way off track, her life becoming tragic. In others, she seems happy and it is only the circumstances of her untimely death that brings the tragedy.
How easy it was to die in the first half of the twentieth century. Life is portrayed as fragile. Sometimes Ursula dies of the same thing repeatedly; some things just seem inevitable. The Spanish Flu was particularly trying and I felt for the family each time they went through it. The Second World War is a large presence in her life, something that cannot be avoided, no matter what course is taken.
In all honestly I felt the book was too long and there were some parts that dragged. I really lost interest in her time in pre-war Germany, perhaps this is because it’s a period I’ve read a fair bit about. I just wanted to get back to Fox Corner or blitzed London. I was eager for Ursula to die, which is an odd feeling to have about a character you actually love.
And why oh why does it have to start with a scene that happens at the end of the book? It detracts a little from Ursula’s personal story, changing her own history. I didn’t want to be constantly thinking about her changing the course of world history, which what it implied. I also found the ending a little unsatisfying.
Overall I loved her writing and can see why so many people love this book. I was drawn into war torn London, with all its grief but also the comradery. I hadn’t known much about the volunteers who scoured the rubble following bombings. It’s harrowing reading in places but told in such a wonderful way, that it never felt like something I wanted to turn away from.
Rebounding back and forth over a fifty-year period, this book is best described as a Margaret Drabble novel of everyday life splintered into a Dr. Who season-long arc. The arrangement is incredibly ambitious, and manages to maintain a complicated set of plots in a way that is mostly successful, often disturbing in its violent detail, yet also occasionally dull. Although the overall effect of this historical novel is uneven, I found that many of the individual events and twists stay vividly in my mind.
Best book I've read in a long time. Can't recommend it enough. Compelling story that is written in an interesting way. Looks at what could happen if the past changes, but in the end, does any of it matter at all? Go get it.
Oh, I wanted to like you so much, dear book, but I just wasn't feeling it. Great concept, but I didn't fall in love with any of the characters. It's not you, it's me. No hard feelings?
Audiobook: Commute audiobook. Requirements for commute audiobook: (1) interesting enough to keep me awake on a long drive and (2) simple enough that I can also pay attention to my driving, with the optional perk (3) a wonderful reader.
Life After Life met requirement (1) resoundedly, (2) it was sufficiently engrossing and complex that I probably shouldn't have been listening while driving. (3) The narrator was wonderful (hypnotic voice, differentiation for different speaking characters but without putting on improbable "voices"), although it would have been nice to have just a tiny bit more time (1 second? 2?) between section breaks to make clear that the setting and circumstances have changed (often radically).
Book: Oh how I loved this book.
For a long while, as Ursula's lives get progressively longer, my assumption (the intended assumption?) was that this was a journey towards "the right life" -- what choices ensure a long, …
Audiobook: Commute audiobook. Requirements for commute audiobook: (1) interesting enough to keep me awake on a long drive and (2) simple enough that I can also pay attention to my driving, with the optional perk (3) a wonderful reader.
Life After Life met requirement (1) resoundedly, (2) it was sufficiently engrossing and complex that I probably shouldn't have been listening while driving. (3) The narrator was wonderful (hypnotic voice, differentiation for different speaking characters but without putting on improbable "voices"), although it would have been nice to have just a tiny bit more time (1 second? 2?) between section breaks to make clear that the setting and circumstances have changed (often radically).
Book: Oh how I loved this book.
For a long while, as Ursula's lives get progressively longer, my assumption (the intended assumption?) was that this was a journey towards "the right life" -- what choices ensure a long, joyful life free of heartache? But then we begin jumping back and forth between time periods, between short lives and long lives, and it becomes apparent that we are not, actually, journeying towards "the right life", but rather simply experiencing the great variety of lives that may come to pass if we and those around us make different choices. As we see, again and again, no matter what choices we make, this is the world of child murder, genocide, bombing attacks, domestic violence, social conventions, terrible accidents, complex family dynamics, and simple human error. Within such a world, there can be no "right life". But it's also a world of human connection, friendship, love, and cherry cake -- so there isn't a "wrong" life, either. We live, and we die, and sometimes we do the best we can, and the world is a strange and terrible and wonderful and incomprehensible place.
I am eagerly anticipating reading this again, several years from now when the details have faded, and I get to experience the slow unfolding of Ursula's lives once more.
I first tried reading this book over the summer, but abandoned it maybe a quarter of the way through. When it started popping up on best-of list and the short-list for ToBX, I decided to give it another shot. It was certainly a better read the second time around, but the opening of the book is so good that the rest of the book struggles to keep up.
An intriguing book. It followed the life of Ursula Todd, from her birth in 1910, to her death in... whenever. Each of one of dozens of possible lives was portrayed, with the small chance or decision that changed her fate and made this life different from the one described in previous pages. Sometimes the difference was simple chance. But more often it was a decision made by Ursula herself, with a shadowy foreknowledge of the outcomes of other of her alternate lives.
This was a very good book, very imaginative and well executed. Among other things, you'll learn a lot about what it was like in England, specifically London, during WWII. For people who've wondered what it would have been like if they'd taken a different path in life... Give it a read, I promise you it's different from anything else you've read. Kind of what Cloud Atlas could have been... or something.
As a reader you will have to keep track of three or four timelines.
I gave it five stars because Kate Atkinson created characters that I cared to keep track of over four timelines. This is also a ingenues approach to writing a story, you can and Kate Atkinson does do many unpleasant scenarios and then just hop back to a turn point in a different timeline.
