Life After Life

Life After Life is a novel that explores the concept of alternate lives and parallel realities.The structure of this novel is unusual. It loops back on itself to describe possible alternate fates and realities for Ursula Todd. The book begins with an adult Ursula assassinating Hitler and then flips back to Ursula’s birth where she is stillborn because her umbilical cord is wrapped around her neck. Further loops of her life have her being born healthy and facing death or near-death situations at some point in her life at which point the novel loops back. The theme of the book is second chances for the dead and the near-dead evidenced by a toddler Ursula who is swept away by the ocean and then reappears later in the narrative.Later loops of her life take her into the second World War where she repeatedly witnesses the devastation caused by the blitz while working in London for the war office. She sees a direct hit on a bomb shelter in Argyll Road in November 1940 and begins to experience a strong sense of déjà vu over and over again which helps her eventually come to realise that she has had previous lives and decides to try to prevent the war by killing Adolf Hitler.Life After Life was published in 2014 by Random House in paperback.Key Features:The book won the 2013 Costa Book Awards (Novel).The book was also shortlisted for the 2013 Orange Prize for Fiction and as one of the 10 Best Books of 2013 by the editors of the New York Times Book Review. Review Kate Atkinson’s new novel is a box of delights. Ingenious in construction indefatigably entertaining it grips the reader’s imagination on the first page and never lets go. If you wish to be moved and astonished read it. And if you want to give a dazzling present buy it for your friends. ―Hilary MantelThere arent enough breathless adjectives to describeLife After Life: Dazzling witty moving joyful mournful profound. Wildly inventive deeply felt. Hilarious. Humane. Simply put: its ONE OF THE BEST NOVELS IVE READ THIS CENTURY. ―Gillian Flynn no1 New York Times bestselling author of Gone Girl and Sharp ObjectsTruly brilliant...Think of Audrey NiffeneggersThe TimeTravelers Wife or David NichollsOne Day...[or] Martin AmissTimes Arrow...This is a rare book that you want Ursula-like to start again the minute you have finished. ―The TimesAbsolutely 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 (newsletter)What makes Atkinson an exceptional writer...is that she does so with an emotional delicacy and understanding that transcend experiment or playfulness.Life After Life gives us a heroine whose fictional underpinning is permanently exposed whose artificial status is never in doubt; and yet one who feels painfully horribly real to us. ―Guardian About the Author Kate Atkinson is an English writer. She studied English Literature and gained a doctorate in American Literature. She has written Behind The Scenes At The Museum that won the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year and five other novels a collection of short stories and a play.