Life After Life

The global bestseller, now a major BBC series

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Life After Life

By: Kate Atkinson

Narrated by: Fenella Woolgar

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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, she finds warmth even in life’s bleakest moments, and shows an extraordinary ability to evoke the past. Here isKate Atkinson at her most profound and inventive, in a novel that celebrates the best and worst of ourselves.

Kate AtkinsonFenella WoolgarTransworld DigitalTodd Family

20th Century

Genre Fiction

Historical

Historical Fiction

War & Military

Women's Fiction

20th Century Genre Fiction Historical Historical Fiction War & Military Women's Fiction

Continue the series

A God in Ruins

By: Kate Atkinson

Critics' reviews

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.

There aren't enough breathless adjectives to describe Life After Life: Dazzling, witty, moving, joyful, mournful, profound. Wildly inventive, deeply felt. Hilarious. Humane. Simply put: it's ONE OF THE BEST NOVELS I'VE READ THIS CENTURY.

Truly brilliant...Think of Audrey Niffenegger's The TimeTraveler's Wife or David Nicholl's One Day...[or] Martin Amis's Times Arrow...This is a rare book that you want, Ursula-like, to start again the minute you have finished.

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.

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.

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.

Deliriously inventive, sharply imagined and ultimately affecting...Atkinson has written something that amounts to so much more than the sum of its (very many) parts. It almost seems to imply that there are new and mysterious things to feel and say about the nature of life and death, the passing of time, fate and possibility.. . [a]magnificently tender and humane novel.

Brilliant...more than just a terrific story about the impact of one existence on another. Atkinson can knock the socks off any rival in terms of skill and style...The tour de force of the book, though, is Atkinson's recreation of the Blitz...unputdownable

Stunned with tiredness thanks to Kate Atkinson's LIFE AFTER LIFE. Couldn't stop reading. Terrific novel, may be her best yet. So enthralling, so well written, so beautifully constructed. Really, I can't fault it. Will be one of my books of the year.

World events, reimagined characters and second chances told with warmth, wit and consummate skill. (Fanny Blake)

Most relevant

Ich fand die Idee nicht so ganz neu, das Konzept gab es auch schon in anderen Büchern, aber nachdem Life after Life bei goodreads so gut abschnitt wollte ich es wagen.
Worum gehts?
Eine Frau wird geboren, in einer kalten verschneiten Winternacht. Und jedesmal wenn sie (verfrüht) stirbt, geht es wieder von vorne los, und die kleinsten Unterschiede bewirken lebenslange Folgen. Das macht die Autorin echt gut, die Geschichte ist amüsant, manchmal herzzerreissend, manchmal traurig, manchmal hat man genau wie die Hauptperson echt die Nase voll von diesem Leben - und zack, geht es wieder von vorne los.
Und an der Stelle schwächelte das Buch doch: diese Beliebigkeit....mal kommt die Hebamme zu spät, dann der Arzt, dann ist eine Schere zur Hand, dann nicht...ganz ohne Sinn. Das empfinden manche sicherlich anders als ich, aber mir waren all die Leben zu fremdbestimmt.
Und zum Ende...naja. Ich hätte gerne eine ausführlichere Variante des vorletzten Lebens gehabt, und es hätte für mich auch das letzte Leben bleiben könne.

Spoiler:

(und na klar, als Deutsche kann man sich nur umbringen....das nervte gewaltig)