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It’s like Groundhog Day as, to use one of Ursula’s mother’s catch-phrases, practice makes perfect. Ursula doesn’t actually have a memory of previous scenarios, but she does have a growing certainty that she needs to do something and, the second and third time, her sense of deja-vu becomes ever clearer. The crucial difference is that this time Ursula is somehow learning to take matters into her own hands, taking ever bolder steps to prevent Bridget from going to London.
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Cheating this death isn’t so easy, and that pesky darkness falls three or four times. …and then we reach a kind of turning-point. She dies from the virulent Spanish flu, picked up from Bridget, the maid, who has contracted it at the Armistice celebrations in London. She falls from a roof, then she doesn’t, having somehow foreseen that to go on to the roof will be dangerous. She drowns at the seaside, then is rescued. Once she’s survived, she stays alive, so she cheats death time and time again. So far, any death she suffers is almost always followed, sometimes almost immediately, by an alternative scenario in which she survives. Ursula, if the reader hasn’t guessed already, is the name given to the child who survives her own birth. But this first time, we don’t know that the ominous phrase ‘Darkness fell’ that ends the chapter is to become Atkinson’s shorthand way of telling us that Ursula has just been killed. Is this an attempt on the life of Hitler? Descriptive details point to it being exactly this and seem to be confirmed when, levelling the pistol at him, the woman calls him ‘Fuhrer’. It’s typical in that the circumstances are confusing and sensational at the same time. The first time around, the arrival of her premature death is presented from the dying infant’s point of view: ‘Darkness fell.’ This is a form of words we recognise from the opening chapter, which is a typical Kate Atkinson-style preamble: in Germany in 1930 a woman called Ursula attempts to assassinate a well-known figure. Atkinson unaccountably finds this sort of wordplay irresistible.) There are several interlocking time-lines in the life of this character this girl will grow into, stretching as far ahead as 1947. (Literally, as he points out himself while holding up the scissors he used. This time the doctor, who had been caught in the snow in the first version, arrives to cut the cord in the nick of time. Then, a chapter or so later, the same little girl is born alive. In 1910 a child is strangled at birth by the umbilical cord wrapped around its neck. I knew beforehand – and every reader knows it after a handful of pages – that the game she’s playing here is the one where the author offers alternative outcomes. When reading any Kate Atkinson novel you know you’re dealing with a player of games.
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Here she is at her most profound and inventive, in a novel that celebrates the best and worst of ourselves.The first quarter – to Ursula’s day out with Izzie With wit and compassion, Kate Atkinson finds warmth even in life's bleakest moments, and shows an extraordinary ability to evoke the past. 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. During a snowstorm in England in 1910, the same baby is born and lives to tell the tale. 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. A dizzying and dazzling tour de force' Daily Mail WINNER OF THE COSTA NOVEL AWARD- the acclaimed number one bestselling novel. Merging family saga with a fluid sense of time and an extraordinarily vivid sense of history at its most human level.