Life After Life - Paperback | Kate Atkinson

Pages: 624

Format: Paperback 

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.