Book 2: Life after Life

2. Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

I’m a sucker for “different versions of the same events” stories. (I haven’t seen Groundhog’s Day, and that’s apparently a shame.) So, when I saw the description of this book in a “Notable books of 2013” list in a magazine, I decided I needed to read it.

The basic setup is this: Ursula Todd, third child of a comfortably middle class British family, is born in 1910, lives, and dies in various ways over and over again. Sometimes she lives for a few hours, sometimes a decade, sometimes a full life. Throughout all of her lives, you get to know her family and the friends and neighbors who show up again and again, and the whole thing has this deeply rooted cyclical movement that was really well done. There were certain images that were showed up in different ways in different lives, little variations in how her path crossed with certain people that ended up having big effects on the way things turned out… it was quite ingenious.

( So Many Spoilers )