Kate Atkinson's first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, was named England's Whitbread Book of the Year in 1996. Since then, she has written eleven more ground-breaking, bestselling books. She lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.
"Life After Life is a hypnotic dance of causality and chance, in
which Ursula makes genuine progress...[Life After Life]
displays...trapeze-artist panache, releasing plotlines into the
oblivion of one past life only to retrieve them, to the reader's
appreciative gasps, in a later one...It's rich in the gravity and
texture of reality... Marvelously vibrant...Atkinson makes every
one of Ursula's lives, as well as the lives of those she touches,
feel inestimably precious."--Laura Miller, Salon
"Life After Life is a masterpiece about how even the smallest
choices can sometimes change the course of history. It's wise,
bittersweet, funny, and unlike anything else you've ever read. Kate
Atkinson is one of my all-time favorite novelists, and I believe
this is her best book yet."--J. Courtney Sullivan, bestselling
author of Maine and Commencement
"Life After Life is dark and funny and suspenseful and sad all at
the same time."--Emily Ecton, NPR (Great Reads of 2013)
"[Atkinson's] latest novel, Life After Life, is her very best... A
big book that defies logic, chronology and even history in ways
that underscore its author's fully untethered imagination... Even
without the sleight of hand, Life After Life would be an
exceptionally captivating book with an engaging cast of
characters... [Atkinson's] own writerly cradle was rocked by a very
sure hand indeed."--Janet Maslin, New York Times
"[Atkinson] is nothing if not clever...A fine writer...filling the
pages with a liveliness and intelligence...Ursula's quest to 'get
it right' gradually becomes less important than Atkinson's talent
to create such an entertaining and suspenseful story that tells
many versions of the history of the 20th century."--Bob Hoover, The
Minneapolis Star Tribune
"A densely layered, century-sprawling work that is a formidable bid
for the brass ring of the U.K.'s prestigious Man Booker Prize. Life
After Life is a drama of failures and providential
rebirths...High-concept premise...A deft and convincing portrayal
of an English family's evolution across two world
wars...Marvelous...Not only does she bring characters to life with
enviable ease, she has an almost offhand knack for vivid
scene-setting ...Her storytelling prowess is on fullest display in
a gorgeous and nerve-racking novella-length chapter set during the
Blitz ... It's spellbindingly done."--Sam Sacks, The Wall Street
Journal
"A thoroughly entertaining, periodically moving read, and a wholly
unique addition ... Atkinson never so much as flirts with pathos;
her ethos and heroine are as unsentimental as the times
require."--Eugenia Williamson, Boston Globe
"Ambitious...[Atkinson] can be playful and profound, an enjoyable
storyteller as well as an artful writer...She gives us a complete
picture of an upper-class British family as it moves into the
modern era, and in such a way that we are left sifting through the
many turns a life can take and contemplating the consequences
thereof."--Sherryl Connelly, New York Daily News
"An audacious, ambitious book that challenges notions of time, fate
and free will, not to mention narrative plausibility...[Atkinson's]
writing is funny and quirky and sharp and sad - calamity laced with
humor - and full of quietly heroic characters who offer knowing
Lorrie Moore-esque parenthetical asides...Atkinson's true genius is
structure...Each version is entirely and equally credible."--Sarah
Lyall, New York Times
"An exercise in narrative gutsiness; a meditation on history,
contingency, and free will; and the best new novel I've read this
year."--Kathryn Schulz, New York Magazine
"Atkinson has a knack for puzzle-making...creating a series of
narrative fragments that cohere into a breathtaking whole...By the
final chapters, it's clear that Ursula is gaining on something much
bigger than any of her lives: a true calling. Watching that pursuit
is frequently heartbreaking and entirely thrilling."--Katie
Arnold-Ratliff, Time
"Atkinson has turned a high-concept conceit into an intricately
crafted, totally engaging new novel...Atkinson combines the
cleverness of metafiction with the warmth and detail of period
fiction for an end result that is satisfyingly original."--Yvonne
Zipp, Christian Science Monitor
"Audacious and darkly mysterious...Atkinson is a master of
structure...A sense of dread but also one of hope infuse the
novel...Even the canniest reader can't predict what will happen
next, so the long novel remains absorbing until its end. It lightly
raises questions about the meaning of life and death and identify,
fate and chance, and leaves them unanswered to echo in the reader's
mind after the final page."--Margaret Quamme, Columbus Dispatch
"Audacious, the kind of sweeping virtuoso epic that actually earns
overheated book-jacket phrases like 'tour de force!'...Atkinson is
a fantastic storyteller... It's all so richly imagined and
ingeniously executed that the mystery feels right. Her domestic
vignettes and wide-screen portraits of wartime resonate with
startling physical and emotional clarity, and even her repetitions
find fresh revelations... What Atkinson has mastered: shining a
light on how full life is of choices and chance, and how lucky we
are to live it."--Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly
"Dazzling...the fantasy behind that reality turns out to be
rivetingly complex."--Karen Holt, O, the Oprah Magazine
"Delightfully precocious and darkly moody... Revealing and
straightforward... Originality is the jumping-off point for this
especially unique novel, and readers looking for something fresh
should take a chance. Readers already in love with Atkinson's
novels, and equally besotted with Jackson Brodie, will be just as
pleased with the life - the lives - of Ursula Todd."--Carol
Memmott, USA Today
"Fascinating... A tour de force that ponders memory and déjà vu-and
puts history on a very human scale."--Parade
"Gripping and sophisticated...Enthralling...[Atkinson] deftly
captures the cruel frailty of life with judicious compassion...No
writer alive makes for better company on the page-knowing, funny,
and prodigally inventive: Ursula is a magnificent creation, but
dozens of finely drawn secondary characters (her bohemian Aunt
Izzie alone would make this book worth reading) force her to fight
for the spotlight on every page...Unflaggingly curious and
unfailingly open-minded, Atkinson is like some great snoop,
prowling among life's mysteries, turning the commonplace inside
out...Literary and entertaining all at once, Atkinson is a
sophisticated artist who also can keep you up well past bedtime,
and that double-barreled talent is on display as never before in
Life After Life. My first reaction upon finishing it was to imitate
the unsinkable Ursula and begin all over again."--Malcolm Jones,
The Daily Beast
"I cannot recommend this book enough. It's nothing short of a
genre-bending masterpiece - thoughtful and compelling, convoluted
in plot but clear in resolve. If I had many lifetimes, I would make
sure to read Life After Life in each."--Kevin Nguyen, Grantland
"Inventive...This ingenious narrative conceit not only illustrates
how seemingly small decisions can affect our lives, it also allows
us as readers to inhabit a novelist's creative process...Atkinson
has crafted a narrative that pushes us to think about our own
choices... Some of Ursula's narratives are so compelling, so
convincing, that it is hard to imagine her ending up any other
way."--Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times
"It is in the depiction of Ursula's loving yet contentious family
that Life After Life truly shines...a dazzling, intricate and
entertaining novel."--Michael Berry, San Francisco Chronicle
"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 Mantel, author of Wolf
Hall and Bring Up the Bodies
"Masterful...Atkinson not only invites readers in, she also asks
them to give up their preconceptions of what a novel should be, and
instead accept what a novel can be... What impresses me about this
flip book of nonstop scenarios - in wartime and peacetime - is not
only how absorbing they are, but how brave Atkinson is to have
written them. After all, there really isn't much recent precedent
for a major, serious yet playfully experimental novel with a female
character at its center. Good for her to have given us one; we
needed it...She opened her novel outward, letting it breathe
unrestricted, all the while creating a strong, inviting draft of
something that feels remarkably like life."--Meg Wolitzer,
NPR.org
"Sure to be one of the most talked-about books of the year. Life
After Life is a dazzling juggling act...(by all means, read this
book)."--Mary Ann Gwinn, Seattle Times
"The Blitz segments vibrate with life, as vivid and horrifying as a
series of glimpses into a charnel house...The natural exuberance of
Atkinson's prose is brought into sharp, precise control. Buried
inside Life After Life is the best Blitz novel since Sarah Waters's
The Night Watch."--Steve Donoghue, The Washington Post
"There aren't enough breathless adjectives to describe Life After
Life: Dazzling, witty, moving, joyful, mournful, profound. Wildly
inventive, deeply felt. Hilarious. Humane."--Gillian Flynn, author
of the #1 New York Times bestseller Gone Girl
"You can't put down Life After Life until you finish it, and then I
suggest you read it a second time."--Bob Hoover, Dallas Morning
News
Life after life after life: Atkinson's telling title suggests not some glorious afterworld but the structure of this remarkable novel, about an English girl born in February, 1910. In fact, Ursula is stillborn in an opening chapter but emerges a lusty babe in the next; Whitbread Award winner Atkinson (Behind the Scenes at the Museum) then hopscotches through time, circling back to offer alternate versions of Ursula's life. Did Ursula endure an unwanted pregnancy, see her brother die of influenza, enter into a sour marriage-or not? Did she survive World War II Britain or instead marry a German and face down Hitler, a gun in her hand? One brief passage shows Ursula musing with a doctor about her fugue states, but Atkinson doesn't waste time belaboring the idea, instead delivering a clear understanding that one life can take different avenues-and what a difference that can make. Atkinson works both large and small, capturing the sweep of history while perfectly rendering the dynamics of Ursula's loving, contentious family: gentle father Hugh, disappointed mother Sylvie, generous sister Pamela, and more. VERDICT Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 10/28/12 and Editors' Picks, LJ 2/15/13, "Editors' Spring Picks."]-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
"Life After Life is a hypnotic dance of causality and
chance, in which Ursula makes genuine progress...[Life After
Life] displays...trapeze-artist panache, releasing plotlines
into the oblivion of one past life only to retrieve them, to the
reader's appreciative gasps, in a later one...It's rich in the
gravity and texture of reality... Marvelously vibrant...Atkinson
makes every one of Ursula's lives, as well as the lives of those
she touches, feel inestimably precious."--Laura Miller, Salon
"Life After Life is a masterpiece about how even the
smallest choices can sometimes change the course of history. It's
wise, bittersweet, funny, and unlike anything else you've ever
read. Kate Atkinson is one of my all-time favorite novelists, and I
believe this is her best book yet."--J. Courtney Sullivan,
bestselling author of Maine and Commencement
"Life After Life is dark and funny and suspenseful and sad
all at the same time."--Emily Ecton, NPR (Great Reads of 2013)
"[Atkinson's] latest novel, Life After Life, is her very
best... A big book that defies logic, chronology and even history
in ways that underscore its author's fully untethered
imagination... Even without the sleight of hand, Life After
Life would be an exceptionally captivating book with an
engaging cast of characters... [Atkinson's] own writerly cradle was
rocked by a very sure hand indeed."--Janet Maslin, New York
Times
"[Atkinson] is nothing if not clever...A fine writer...filling the
pages with a liveliness and intelligence...Ursula's quest to 'get
it right' gradually becomes less important than Atkinson's talent
to create such an entertaining and suspenseful story that tells
many versions of the history of the 20th century."--Bob Hoover, The
Minneapolis Star Tribune
"A densely layered, century-sprawling work that is a formidable bid
for the brass ring of the U.K.'s prestigious Man Booker Prize.
Life After Life is a drama of failures and providential
rebirths...High-concept premise...A deft and convincing portrayal
of an English family's evolution across two world
wars...Marvelous...Not only does she bring characters to life with
enviable ease, she has an almost offhand knack for vivid
scene-setting ...Her storytelling prowess is on fullest display in
a gorgeous and nerve-racking novella-length chapter set during the
Blitz ... It's spellbindingly done."--Sam Sacks, The Wall Street
Journal
"A thoroughly entertaining, periodically moving read, and a wholly
unique addition ... Atkinson never so much as flirts with pathos;
her ethos and heroine are as unsentimental as the times
require."--Eugenia Williamson, Boston Globe
"Ambitious...[Atkinson] can be playful and profound, an enjoyable
storyteller as well as an artful writer...She gives us a complete
picture of an upper-class British family as it moves into the
modern era, and in such a way that we are left sifting through the
many turns a life can take and contemplating the consequences
thereof."--Sherryl Connelly, New York Daily News
"An audacious, ambitious book that challenges notions of time, fate
and free will, not to mention narrative plausibility...[Atkinson's]
writing is funny and quirky and sharp and sad - calamity laced with
humor - and full of quietly heroic characters who offer knowing
Lorrie Moore-esque parenthetical asides...Atkinson's true genius is
structure...Each version is entirely and equally credible."--Sarah
Lyall, New York Times
"An exercise in narrative gutsiness; a meditation on history,
contingency, and free will; and the best new novel I've read this
year."--Kathryn Schulz, New York Magazine
"Atkinson has a knack for puzzle-making...creating a series of
narrative fragments that cohere into a breathtaking whole...By the
final chapters, it's clear that Ursula is gaining on something much
bigger than any of her lives: a true calling. Watching that pursuit
is frequently heartbreaking and entirely thrilling."--Katie
Arnold-Ratliff, Time
"Atkinson has turned a high-concept conceit into an intricately
crafted, totally engaging new novel...Atkinson combines the
cleverness of metafiction with the warmth and detail of period
fiction for an end result that is satisfyingly original."--Yvonne
Zipp, Christian Science Monitor
"Audacious and darkly mysterious...Atkinson is a master of
structure...A sense of dread but also one of hope infuse the
novel...Even the canniest reader can't predict what will happen
next, so the long novel remains absorbing until its end. It lightly
raises questions about the meaning of life and death and identify,
fate and chance, and leaves them unanswered to echo in the reader's
mind after the final page."--Margaret Quamme, Columbus Dispatch
"Audacious, the kind of sweeping virtuoso epic that actually earns
overheated book-jacket phrases like 'tour de force!'...Atkinson is
a fantastic storyteller... It's all so richly imagined and
ingeniously executed that the mystery feels right. Her domestic
vignettes and wide-screen portraits of wartime resonate with
startling physical and emotional clarity, and even her repetitions
find fresh revelations... What Atkinson has mastered: shining a
light on how full life is of choices and chance, and how lucky we
are to live it."--Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly
"Dazzling...the fantasy behind that reality turns out to be
rivetingly complex."--Karen Holt, O, the Oprah Magazine
"Delightfully precocious and darkly moody... Revealing and
straightforward... Originality is the jumping-off point for this
especially unique novel, and readers looking for something fresh
should take a chance. Readers already in love with Atkinson's
novels, and equally besotted with Jackson Brodie, will be just as
pleased with the life - the lives - of Ursula Todd."--Carol
Memmott, USA Today
"Fascinating... A tour de force that ponders memory and deja vu-and
puts history on a very human scale."--Parade
"Gripping and sophisticated...Enthralling...[Atkinson] deftly
captures the cruel frailty of life with judicious compassion...No
writer alive makes for better company on the page-knowing, funny,
and prodigally inventive: Ursula is a magnificent creation, but
dozens of finely drawn secondary characters (her bohemian Aunt
Izzie alone would make this book worth reading) force her to fight
for the spotlight on every page...Unflaggingly curious and
unfailingly open-minded, Atkinson is like some great snoop,
prowling among life's mysteries, turning the commonplace inside
out...Literary and entertaining all at once, Atkinson is a
sophisticated artist who also can keep you up well past bedtime,
and that double-barreled talent is on display as never before in
Life After Life. My first reaction upon finishing it was to
imitate the unsinkable Ursula and begin all over again."--Malcolm
Jones, The Daily Beast
"I cannot recommend this book enough. It's nothing short of a
genre-bending masterpiece - thoughtful and compelling, convoluted
in plot but clear in resolve. If I had many lifetimes, I would make
sure to read Life After Life in each."--Kevin Nguyen,
Grantland
"Inventive...This ingenious narrative conceit not only illustrates
how seemingly small decisions can affect our lives, it also allows
us as readers to inhabit a novelist's creative process...Atkinson
has crafted a narrative that pushes us to think about our own
choices... Some of Ursula's narratives are so compelling, so
convincing, that it is hard to imagine her ending up any other
way."--Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times
"It is in the depiction of Ursula's loving yet contentious family
that Life After Life truly shines...a dazzling, intricate
and entertaining novel."--Michael Berry, San Francisco
Chronicle
"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 Mantel, author of Wolf
Hall and Bring Up the Bodies
"Masterful...Atkinson not only invites readers in, she also asks
them to give up their preconceptions of what a novel should
be, and instead accept what a novel can be... What impresses
me about this flip book of nonstop scenarios - in wartime and
peacetime - is not only how absorbing they are, but how brave
Atkinson is to have written them. After all, there really isn't
much recent precedent for a major, serious yet playfully
experimental novel with a female character at its center. Good for
her to have given us one; we needed it...She opened her novel
outward, letting it breathe unrestricted, all the while creating a
strong, inviting draft of something that feels remarkably like
life."--Meg Wolitzer, NPR.org
"Sure to be one of the most talked-about books of the year. Life
After Life is a dazzling juggling act...(by all means, read
this book)."--Mary Ann Gwinn, Seattle Times
"The Blitz segments vibrate with life, as vivid and horrifying as a
series of glimpses into a charnel house...The natural exuberance of
Atkinson's prose is brought into sharp, precise control. Buried
inside Life After Life is the best Blitz novel since Sarah
Waters's The Night Watch."--Steve Donoghue, The Washington
Post
"There aren't enough breathless adjectives to describe Life After
Life: Dazzling, witty, moving, joyful, mournful, profound. Wildly
inventive, deeply felt. Hilarious. Humane."--Gillian Flynn, author
of the #1 New York Times bestseller Gone Girl
"You can't put down Life After Life until you finish it, and
then I suggest you read it a second time."--Bob Hoover, Dallas
Morning News
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