Life After Life: A Novel

"If I had to have a favourite, it would be this. Life After Life poses the question: what could happen if you could start life over and over again, until you get things right? It’s about a girl called Ursula Todd, who is born into a quite affluent, middle-class, Edwardian British family, who lives an extraordinary life in which she repeatedly dies and comes back to life. Sometimes she can almost remember things that have happened—a sort of hazy déja vous—which allows her to avoid the mistakes she made last time around. Sometimes that enables her to save herself, sometimes it enables her to save people that she loves. “ Life After Life asks: if you had the opportunity to kill Adolf Hitler, would you take it?” So it’s really about the different courses that life can take, the way trauma and experience ripple through time. Only parts are set during the Second World War, but they are quite extraordinary—really raw, really graphic, and actually quite hard to read. The depictions of the Blitz will stay with you, particularly. And it asks a really important question: if you had the opportunity to kill Adolf Hitler , would you take it? Structurally, it’s a very ambitious novel. It’s quite a thing to pull the rug out from under the reader over and over again—and to get away with it, which is what Atkinson achieves with this book. Yes, absolutely, because every time she starts again she is slightly different, slightly changed by the experience of the past—even if she can’t quite remember them, they are somewhere in her mind. It’s a brilliant book."