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In 'life after life,' caught in the dangerous machinery of history.

Meg Wolitzer

Life After Life

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Flannery O'Connor said short stories need to have a beginning, a middle and an end, though not necessarily in that order. But what about novels? Kate Atkinson seems to believe there can be a beginning, a middle and an end, and then another beginning, plus several more middles ... and why not have a beginning again?

What she's done in her masterful new book, Life After Life, is prove that what makes a long piece of fiction succeed might have very little to do with the progression of its story, and more to do with something hard to define and even harder to produce: a fully-realized world. Atkinson not only invites readers in but also asks them to give up their preconceptions of what a novel should be, and instead accept what a novel can be.

When I started Life After Life, I have to admit, I wasn't sure I wanted to keep going. I was disoriented, and I thought maybe the problem was me — maybe I was just dumb. In the opening pages, in a German cafe in November 1930, a woman raises a gun and shoots Adolf Hitler. Gamely anticipating the consequences of that action — even if they held the possibility of Twilight Zone cheesiness — I turned the page, only to find that there were no consequences, at least not yet, for the clock had turned back 20 years and the action had moved to another locale.

Now it's England in February 1910, and a baby is about to be born, but the doctor hasn't arrived yet: " 'Dr. Fellowes should have been here,' Sylvie moaned. 'Why isn't he here yet? Where is he?' ... 'Yer man'll be stuck in the snow, I expect, ma'm,' " says Bridget, the maid. And then, moments later: " 'Oh, ma'am,' Bridget cried suddenly, 'she's all blue, so she is.' "

The death of a baby, of course, is an unbearably sad thing, and surely the fallout of that death will come in the next chapter. The grieving parents, the lost possibilities. But no. Because, in the next chapter, the road is open, and Sylvie, who has just given birth, asks, "A girl, Dr. Fellowes? May I see her?" To which he replies, " 'Yes, Mrs. Todd, a bonny, bouncing baby girl.' Sylvie thought Dr. Fellowes might be over-egging the pudding with his alliteration. He was not one for bonhomie at the best of times."

Kate Atkinson is also the author of Started Early, Took My Dog. Courtesy Hachette Book Group hide caption

But the exaggerated buoyancy of the doctor is meant to contrast with the gloom of the previous version of the delivery. This is arch but serious stuff, and for a while there, it's hard to know how Atkinson wants her readers to feel about it.

But I kept on reading because I suspected, this being Kate Atkinson, that it would transform itself, and it certainly did. Ursula Todd — who happens to be the woman in the cafe, as well as the baby turning blue, and the baby not turning blue — is the novel's main character. In a sense she's meant to be you — just another soul who has the misfortune of being born, living and getting caught in the dangerous machinery of history.

And the dangers abound. Ursula is raped and impregnated — unless, wait, she isn't raped and impregnated at all. For in another version she manages to rebuff her would-be attacker, and in yet another version, the moment between her and this same man turns out to be merely lightly amorous. At one point, Atkinson places Ursula in prewar Germany, where she befriends a young Eva Braun; and then, during the war, she's seen working in London on a rescue unit, grimly coping with its everyday shocks and horrors. In an alternate reality, Ursula works in wartime intelligence. 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.

Life after life grind on for Ursula and all the members of her family, who, though their outcomes change, remain roughly the same people throughout the book. Maurice, the horrible brother no one can stand, is horrible in every version of this story. And Ursula, while not a world-beater except perhaps in her big Hitler moment, is always human and readable.

In real life, people inevitably have to make choices about how to live. (You can't live all ways.) But Kate Atkinson didn't choose one path for Ursula Todd, and she didn't need to. Instead, 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 i s the author o f The Interestings, which comes out in April.

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Life After Life review — this tale of life on a loop has a beguiling power

Challenge yourself with today’s puzzles.

★★★★☆ Last weekend my ten-year-old daughter asked me how many times I have been close to dying. It was an alarming question, far more interesting than the usual ones about the hamster she wants, and I replied honestly. Quite a few times, I realised, mostly while cycling.

Actual dying happens a lot to Ursula Todd, the heroine of Kate Atkinson’s bravura 2013 novel who is magnetically brought to (adult) life by Thomasin McKenzie. At her birth in 1910 with the cord wrapped around her neck, at sea when she ventures too far out, falling out of a window when her horrid brother Maurice has defenestrated her prized dolly. And then in bed when the housemaid Bridget brings back Spanish flu from the Armistice celebrations, a

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Review: Life After Life, By Kate Atkinson

The heroine of this elegant experimental novel gets not one, but several chances to alter the course of history, article bookmarked.

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Aficionados of Kate Atkinson's novels – this is the eighth – will tell you that she writes two sorts: the "literary" kind, exemplified by her Whitbread Prize-winning debut Behind the Scenes at the Museum , and the Jackson Brodie crime thrillers. In reality, the distinction is superfluous. Atkinson is a literary writer who likes experimenting with different forms, and her books appeal to a huge audience, full stop. However, for those still keen on these discriminations, Life After Life is one of the "literary" ones. As with the Brodies, Atkinson steers with a light touch, despite the grimness of the subject matter.

"What if we had the chance to do it again and again … until we finally get it right?" asks one of the characters near the end. Life after Life is about being given that chance. In the opening scene, it's 1930. A young woman named Ursula enters a coffee shop in Germany and shoots a man she addresses as "Führer". The episode ends with the words: "Darkness fell." Next, we're back in 1910, with a snowstorm raging outside. A baby girl is born, and, in the absence of medical intervention, dies. Again, those words: "Darkness fell". The scene is replayed, but this time the doctor makes it through the snow and baby Ursula lives. The child thrives until her fifth summer, when she drowns on a Cornish beach. Darkness falls again, and we're sent back to 1910. Are you getting the idea? In Ursula's next chance at doing it right, an artist rescues her from the waves, and darkness does not fall again until 1915, when she slips from a bedroom window while trying to rescue a doll ….

By this time, the reader may wonder whether he or she hasn't ended up in a game of snakes and ladders played on the grand scale. Some of the narrative tension derives from seeing how long Ursula will last each time – she's very accident prone – but in the meantime there's plenty else going on. Each time an event is revisited, it's described differently, from another character's viewpoint, or with extra context, or slight changes to the circumstances, and it gradually dawns on you that the author is up to something more subtle and complex than mere writerly legerdemain.

Overall, it's safe to say that the early narrative follows the following course: Ursula is the third child of Sylvie and Hugh Todd, brought up in an idyllic English upper-middle-class country home, sister to the soulless and pragmatic Maurice and jolly-hockey-sticks Pamela. She's an engaging girl, but quirky, with a tendency to fits of what her despairing mother calls "déjà-vu". Teddy, the sunny family darling, arrives soon after, then, finally, Jimmy, conceived after Hugh's return from Flanders Fields. Swelling the dramatis personae are disreputable Aunt Izzie – ripe to play a pivotal role in many of Ursula's crises – Mrs Glover the dour cook, and Bridget, the plain-faced Irish maidservant.

Beyond this basic set up, all bets are off. Bridget and Teddy may or may not die of Spanish flu, Ursula this time returning to Square One in order to save them, rather than because she's died herself. On her 16th birthday, Ursula may or may not be raped by a university pal of Maurice's, causing her life to decline to a particularly nasty dead end. Or does she instead throw off the rapist, go to college and visit Germany where she befriends Eva Braun?

Whatever the outcome of individual strands, the novel pushes on towards its heartland: the London Blitz. Ursula works for the War Office, has an on-off affair with an older ex-Navy officer, does or doesn't become an ARP warden. Some of the most vivid scenes concern the work of the rescue teams as, with bombs falling and buildings collapsing around them, they pursue their grim agenda. Again and again, Ursula experiences one particularly traumatic event: a direct hit on a dozen people sheltering in a cellar in Argyll Road in November 1940. The horror is drummed in so hard that it becomes apparent where the logic of the novel will lead: the war should not have been allowed to happen.

The novels of Kate Atkinson habitually shuffle past and present, but Life After Life takes the shuffling to such extremes that the reader has to hold on to his hat. It's more than a storytelling device. Ursula and her therapist discuss theories of time. He tells her that it is circular, but she claims that it's a palimpsest. The writer has a further purpose. Elsewhere, Atkinson is quoted as saying: "I'm very interested in the moral path, doing the right thing." It's impossible not to be sympathetic toward Ursula, who yearns to save the people she loves and has been blessed – or cursed – with the ability to do it.

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Home / Books / Life After Life

Life After Life

Winner of the Costa Novel Award and now a BBC TV series

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

“What if we had a chance to do it again and again, until we finally did get it right? Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”

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Promotional video for Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

• An audio excerpt from Life After Life read by Fenella Woolgar

Author’s note

Discover the story behind the story of Life after Life – how the book came to be, the original inspiration, and sources.

Please note: This does contain spoilers so if you haven’t yet read the book, then you might prefer to do this first.

“I was born at the end of 1951 and grew up feeling that had I just missed the Second World War, that something terrible and tremendous had occurred and I would never know it. Looking back this strikes me as odd for as a child I was never aware of those around me talking about it. It was almost as though it had never happened, for although my family experienced the war they rarely mentioned it. It’s only recently I’ve come to realize – and understand – that once it was over and people faced the grim reality of the peace, all they wanted to do was to forget – not just the destruction wrought on us but the greater destruction that we rained down on Europe. We had reduced Germany to rubble and we were not necessarily proud of that, nor of the endless moral compromise that war necessitates. People move on, history remains…”

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Reading guide and discussion questions for Life After Life

Reading guide and discussion questions for Life After Life from Litlovers.com

Kate Atkinson’s new novel is a box of delights. Ingenious in construction, indefatigably entertaining, it grips the readers 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 The Mirror and the Light

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.

Gillian Flynn, No.1 New York Times author of Gone Girl and Sharp Objects

Truly brilliant…Think of Audrey Niffenegger’s The TimeTraveler’s Wife or David Nicholl’s One Day…[or] Martin Amis’s Times Arrow, his rewinding of the Holocaust that was shortlisted for the Booker. Life After Life should have the popular success of the former and deserves to win prizes, too. It has that kind of thrill to it, of an already much-loved novelist taking a leap, and breaking through to the next level…This is a rare book that you want, Ursula-like, to start again the minute you have finished.

Helen Rumbelow, The Times

What makes Atkinson an exceptional writer and this is her most ambitious and most gripping work to date 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.

Alex Clark, Guardian

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.

Amber Pearson, Daily Mail

Deliriously inventive, sharply imagined and ultimately affecting…The scenes set in Blitz-stricken London will stay with me forever…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.

Julie Myerson, Observer

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.

Evening Standard

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.

Marian Keyes (Email newsletter)

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.

Val McDermid (Twitter)

World events, reimagined characters and second chances told with warmth, wit and consummate skill.

Fanny Blake, Woman & Home

Startlingly brilliant…endlessly rich.

James Walton, Reader's Digest

Life After Life is to be applauded for its inventiveness, and for reminding us of lives vanished without trace or memory in the waste and monstrosity of war.

Literary Review

Atkinson, like Audrey Niffenegger before her with the similarly ambitious The Time Traveller’s Wife, is a confident enough writer to bear her high concept along well above water level.

Atkinson’s great skill is in portraying the exquisite tapestry of [life] with warmth, humour and immense humanity.

Yorkshire Post

One of the most innovative, pacy plots of any recent novel.

Psychologies Magazine

Playful, intelligent and beguiling…Astoundingly accomplished.

Marie Claire

A profound read that finds light in the darkest times.

Glamour Magazine

If you enjoyed The Time Traveller’s Wife, you will love this inventive fantasy from the author of the Jackson Brodie series…marvel at Atkinson’s skill in carrying off this absorbing feat of imagination.

Sunday Mirror

Atkinson’s achievement is to convince the reader that being disorientated about exactly what has happened so far is acceptable and enjoyable…deftly constructed…The innovative narrative structure of Life After Life reasserts the best there is to hope for in human existence.

Times Literary Supplement

Hilary Mantel, a rival for the Women’s Prize, once said that Atkinson “delivers to the populace its jokes and its tragedies as efficiently as Dickens once delivered his, though Atkinson has a game-plan more sophisticated than Dickens’s”. This is Atkinson’s best book to date, and she is as worthy as Mantel for the Prize.

Daily Telegraph

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Word of Mouth

Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, life after life.

Ursula Todd, the heroine of Kate Atkinson's LIFE AFTER LIFE, is born and dies more than a dozen times in the novel. She is always born on February 11, 1910, in the midst of a crippling snowstorm. Sometimes she dies right afterwards, due to the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. Or she lives to a relatively advanced age, surviving two world wars and a host of other hazards.

Ursula, a perceptive young woman who has always been a bit of an observer --- the middle child in her bustling household --- eventually grows more and more aware of her bizarre life story/ies. Even if she doesn't actively remember the lives that have preceded the one she's living now, she still suffers from a tremendous feeling of déjà vu, so strong and upsetting at times that her mother takes her to a Buddhist therapist, who offers sympathy if not precisely answers.

"[Atkinson] has built on the sprawling, multi-dimensional characteristics of her detective fiction in this novel...as she gradually introduces readers not only to Ursula's vivid inner life but also to the dozens of people whose lives she touches, time after time. LIFE AFTER LIFE is Kate Atkinson at her brilliantly inventive best."

At times, Ursula's growing self-awareness can lead to moments of black humor; when she and her family members keep dying of Spanish flu, for example, young Ursula grows increasingly desperate (if not exactly sophisticated) in her efforts to prevent this outcome from happening in perpetuity. Elsewhere, though, Ursula eventually develops --- whether she is aware of it or not --- the ability to recognize the patterns not only of her own life but of the world in which she has grown up again and again.

Ursula is born into a country house, a life of privilege. Her father fights in the Great War, and her older brother is (regardless of which life she’s living) an unlikable, distant, even sometimes cruel young man. Ursula is alternately fascinated and embarrassed by her father's younger sister, whose rising and falling fortunes sometimes seem to mimic Ursula's own. As a young woman coming of age in the volatile interwar period, Ursula is vulnerable to any number of obstacles --- rape, unwanted pregnancy, illegal abortion, harassment, despair, inadequate education --- all of which she encounters on one or more of her journeys through history.

But Ursula has an advantage that none of the rest of us has --- she can learn from her mistakes and those of her friends, family and acquaintances. "What if we had a chance to do it again and again," her younger brother Teddy asks Ursula at one point, "until we finally did get it right?" "I think it would be exhausting," replies Ursula, and she's right --- particularly as she relives the harrowing bombings of World War II on both the German and British sides of the war, forced to confront enough horrors for dozens of lifetimes. Eventually, though, Ursula realizes that she just might be able not only to witness history but also to reshape the madness around her, to give not only herself but also countless others another chance at life. "This is love," Ursula reflects as she embarks on one more chance to improve the world, "And the practice of it makes it perfect."

Kate Atkinson, who won the Whitbread Award for her debut novel, BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE MUSEUM, has taken a bit of a break from literary fiction over the past several years to write a series of innovative and unusual detective novels. With LIFE AFTER LIFE, she returns to some of the considerations of her earlier fiction, particularly about the inner life of children and about how wars and the deaths of children affect families and women in particular. But she has built on the sprawling, multi-dimensional characteristics of her detective fiction in this novel as well, as she gradually introduces readers not only to Ursula's vivid inner life but also to the dozens of people whose lives she touches, time after time. LIFE AFTER LIFE is Kate Atkinson at her brilliantly inventive best.

Reviewed by Norah Piehl on April 5, 2013

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

• Publication Date: April 2, 2013
• Genres: Fiction , Historical Fiction
• Hardcover: 544 pages
• Publisher: Reagan Arthur Books
• ISBN-10: 0316176486
• ISBN-13: 9780316176484

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Different Versions of a Life, All Lived

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By Janet Maslin

• March 25, 2013

In the midst of a secret love affair, Ursula Todd discovers that she is an excellent liar. The same can be said admiringly of Kate Atkinson, whose latest novel, “Life After Life,” is her very best. Ms. Atkinson’s wide-ranging body of work includes several novels that resemble mysteries, but she has never had the narrowly deductive mind to suit that genre. “Life After Life” is a big book that defies logic, chronology and even history in ways that underscore its author’s fully untethered imagination.

Ursula is the main character in “Life After Life,” but she appears in different, contradictory versions of similar events. She also seems to die at many different times during the book, only to reappear unscathed, as if mortal danger were only a trick of the mind. “Life After Life” is full of mind games, but they are purposeful rather than emptily playful. For Ursula the past and the present become intertwined in a way that is “nightmarish, as if her inner dark landscape had become manifest.” This is not mumbo-jumbo. It’s not horror, either. It’s more like a narrative multiverse, in which different versions of Ursula’s life compete for the reader’s attention and keep a conventionally one-note story well out of reach. True, it can be frustrating to be deep in the midst of one of Ms. Atkinson’s plot threads, only to have her abandon it and switch to something else. But unlike some of her more random-seeming books, like the 2011 “Started Early, Took My Dog,” this one connects its loose ends with facile but welcome clarity.

On Feb. 11, 1910, Ursula is born, strangled by her umbilical cord. “Little lungs, like dragonfly wings failing to inflate in the foreign atmosphere,” Ms. Atkinson writes of the birth. “No wind in the strangled pipe. The buzzing of a thousand bees in the tiny curled pearl of an ear.”

It is a snowy night, and the whole book hinges on whether a doctor will get to the Todd house in time to negate this version of Ursula’s life story. Although she is saved, the snow becomes a recurring motif for Ms. Atkinson’s repeated blurring of the line between life and death.

Even without the sleight of hand, “Life After Life” would be an exceptionally captivating book with an engaging cast of characters. There is Ursula’s doting father, Hugh, who calls her Little Bear and refers to his study as “the growlery.” There is Sylvie, her aristocratic mother, who becomes more bitter over time; this could be connected to Ursula’s having once seen Sylvie emerging from a hotel with a man other than Hugh. There is Teddy, the beloved brother who always wants to know whether there was cake at a party, and snobbish Maurice, the only loathed sibling in the family. There is Pamela, Ursula’s sister and helpmate, who writes archly about Hitler in 1933: “He likes women, children, dogs, really what can you fault? It’s just a shame he’s a dictator with no respect for the law or common humanity.”

In a far-fetched but necessary plotline (and a needlessly conventional prologue), Ursula either will or will not be close enough to the Führer to aim a gun at him. But she has so many alternative lives to get through before reaching that juncture. She has a sexual experience on her 16th birthday, and at first it is a rape resulting in pregnancy. Later on, the same birthday involves Ursula in different liaisons, cruel or romantic, with very different teenage boys, and the course of her future hangs in the balance.

In one iteration of the plot, she is shamed enough to do penance by marrying a terribly abusive schoolteacher. When he disapproves of the egg Ursula makes him for breakfast (“a sickly jellyfish deposited on toast to die”), he drops it on her head, then violently beats her.

“Life After Life” is ultimately centered on the brutal British experience of World War II, with characters caught in the blitz and Ursula joining a rescue unit for injured civilians. As powerful as the rest of “Life After Life” is, its lengthy evocation of this nightmare is gutsy and deeply disturbing, just as the author intends it to be.

Nowhere is safe: she describes a man “killed by shrapnel from the ack-acks in Hyde Park.” Mortuaries try to match up body parts “like macabre jigsaws.” One of Ursula’s early missions involves trying to save a basement full of people who are being drowned in sewage. And unlike most of the events in this novel, these gruesome scenes have no alternative versions.

Wartime also inspires one of Ursula’s brothers to want to write about the human condition. “A writer ?” their mother says. “I fear the hand of the evil fairy rocked his cradle.” On the evidence of this book, Ms. Atkinson can afford to joke about that. Her own writerly cradle was rocked by a very sure hand indeed.

LIFE AFTER LIFE

By Kate Atkinson

529 pages. Regan Arthur Books. $27.99.

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Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2013

New York Times Bestseller

LIFE AFTER LIFE

by Kate Atkinson ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2013

Provocative, entertaining and beautifully written. It’s not quite the tour de force that her Case Histories (2004) was, but...

If you could travel back in time and kill Hitler, would you? Of course you would.

Atkinson’s ( Started Early, Took My Dog , 2011, etc.) latest opens with that conceit, a hoary what-if of college dorm discussions and, for that matter, of other published yarns (including one,  mutatis mutandis , by no less an eminence than George Steiner). But Atkinson isn’t being lazy, not in the least: Her protagonist’s encounter with der Führer is just one of several possible futures. Call it a more learned version of  Groundhog Day , but that character can die at birth, or she can flourish and blossom; she can be wealthy, or she can be a fugitive; she can be the victim of rape, or she can choose her sexual destiny. All these possibilities arise, and all take the story in different directions, as if to say: We scarcely know ourselves, so what do we know of the lives of those who came before us, including our own parents and—in this instance—our unconventional grandmother? And all these possibilities sometimes entwine, near to the point of confusion. In one moment, for example, the conversation turns to a child who has died; reminds Ursula, our heroine, “Your daughter....She fell in the fire,” an event the child’s poor mother gainsays: “ ‘I only ever had Derek,’ she concluded firmly.” Ah, but there’s the rub with alternate realities, all of which, Atkinson suggests, can be folded up into the same life so that all are equally real. Besides, it affords several opportunities to do old Adolf in, what with his “funny little flap of the hand backward so that he looked as if he were cupping his ear to hear them better” and all.

Pub Date: April 2, 2013

ISBN: 978-0-316-17648-4

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2013

MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | HISTORICAL MYSTERY | GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE

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by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.

A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice ( The Bone Collection , 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”

Pub Date: March 17, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020

GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | SUSPENSE | THRILLER | DETECTIVES & PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS | SUSPENSE | GENERAL & DOMESTIC THRILLER

More by Kathy Reichs

by Kathy Reichs

by C.J. Box ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 28, 2015

A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...

Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series ( Stone Cold , 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.

Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.

Pub Date: July 28, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Minotaur

Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015

GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE

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by C.J. Box

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The Spinoff

Pop Culture July 17, 2022

Review: life after life is a gorgeous tv adaptation of a quietly beautiful book.

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The BBC miniseries based on Kate Atkinson’s modern classic is a triumphant companion piece to her novel – thanks in no small part to Thomasin McKenzie’s best performance yet, writes Sam Brooks.

Nothing about Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life suggests it would be a good candidate for a TV adaptation. The high-concept 2014 novel revolves around Ursula, a British woman born in the first half of the 20th century who finds herself caught in a loop of life, death and rebirth. She dies multiple times – anywhere from within the first few moments of being born, to living decades before being crushed by rubble during the WWII bombing raids on London. 

There is no rhyme or reason to the loop. Ursula never figures out why this happens to her, and barely even tries to. She just lives through it, and tries to do something slightly better, or at least different, each time. Atkinson rejects the impulse to solve the mystery by refusing to even ask questions – Ursula’s lives simply are . Now watch them unfold. In this respect, Life After Life runs against how we’re told dramas should play out, with answered questions and closed bookends.

It’s the sort of novel that’s always going to pose a challenge to writers eyeing a potential adaptation for the screen. Which is why it’s something of a surprise that the BBC’s Life After Life, streaming now on TVNZ+, is such a success.

Across four episodes, all directed by John Crowley (Brooklyn), Atkinson’s novel is condensed and translated into a glossy prestige drama. At times, you can sense it attempting to hold the audience’s hand – the first episode sets out the premise relatively clearly, while the novel had no such comforting impulse – but ultimately, the series becomes its own creature. It’s a companion piece to the novel, rather than a straightforward adaptation.

One of the most striking differences is the series’ treatment of Ursula, played in adulthood by New Zealand actor Thomasin McKenzie (Jojo Rabbit) in what might be her best performance yet. Whereas the novel had a strong sense of who Ursula was – headstrong, emboldened, slowly jaded by the onward march of history – the series instead portrays her as an everywoman character, moulded more by her circumstances than her choices. 

We see Ursula the beleaguered housewife, Ursula the expat caught up in pre-war Germany, Ursula the wartime volunteer. It’s a credit to McKenzie that she is able to tie all these different Ursulas together – even though some of them get barely 10 minutes of screen time – and make each one feel lived-in and alive. The Ursulas we see for only a few scenes feel as important and vital as those we see for half an episode.

It’s a performance that sits in between the series and the novel, tying them together. The point is, of course, that even though Ursula has so many different lives, women of the time only had so many choices, so many lives. McKenzie plays the dawning realisation of that reality so beautifully that it makes you wish the series was even longer – a rare wish if ever there was one.

In saying all that, Life After Life is still an acquired taste. While this isn’t heavy material compared to the serial murderers and abusers that populate our streaming services, it’s not exactly light either, and it’s hard not to be aware that you’re watching a very serious literary adaptation. That’s especially true when the series dips into yet another philosophical discussion on cycles and loops, and the meaning of it all – another hand-hold that Atkinson resisted in her novel. 

It rests on the ensemble cast to bring the series back down to earth, especially Sian Clifford (best known as Fleabag’s sister Claire) as Ursula’s terse mother, and Jessica Brown Findlay, finally making good on the promise of her Downton Abbey years, as Ursula’s glamorous Aunt Izzie who lives her one life to the hilt. These performances are vivid enough to almost, but not quite, turns this into a family drama that just so happens to have a rather unusual protagonist at its centre.

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If there’s anything to ding Life After Life on, it’s that it could very easily be mistaken for just another World War Two saga, with khakis , khakis and greys dominating the screen. It’s understandable to use the established visual shorthand for this period, but it does the inventiveness of the series’ premise a disservice to make it look so conventional. The biggest visual flourish, a scattering of snow on Ursula’s face whenever she moves from one life into the next, ends up feeling frustrating – a reminder that more could have been done.

Not so long ago, Life After Life would have been event television – or at least a shoo-in for a Sunday Theatre slot. But in 2022, when hugely anticipated limited series seem to drop every other week, a four-episode adaptation of an acclaimed novel doesn’t feel especially urgent or necessary. Ironically, that’s sort of fitting for Life After Life. It’s about lives that don’t feel especially urgent or necessary to examine, but if you just take the time to look at them, they’re hard to ignore – and harder to shake.

Life After Life is available to watch on TVNZ+ now.

Den of Geek

Life After Life Review: a Delicate, Life-Affirming Adaptation

Kate Atkinson’s brilliant ‘unadaptable’ multiverse novel has been turned into a tender and wise TV drama

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Life After Life , Kate Atkinson’s acclaimed 2013 novel that’s now a four-part BBC drama , is founded on the bruising truth that existence is unbearably fragile. Its world, our world, is a dangerous place pitted with obstacles. It’s the story of Ursula, a character born in 1910, who dies and is reborn in a continuous loop. Each time Ursula falls foul of life’s lethal traps, she begins again, not remembering her lives before but not quite forgetting them either. Her past deaths leave her with tugging instincts – don’t step there, don’t take his hand, don’t linger – that gradually extend her life and, if well-managed, those of the people she loves.

For Ursula, death waits in all places – in the knot of umbilical cord around a baby’s neck, inside a rolling wave and beneath an open window. Death waits equally in a pandemic and in wartime and in the face of a stranger on the street. One false move and it’s game over.

That established, this delicate adaptation leads us to its real premise: with so much danger abroad, our only response is acceptance and the seeking out of joy. Acknowledging that life is so often extinguished in blasé style, what else is there but to,  in the words of Ursula’s charmingly open-minded child psychotherapist, try to enjoy it. Thus a story freighted by death becomes determinedly life-affirming.

New Zealand actor Thomasin McKenzie ( The Power of the Dog , Jojo Rabbit ) leads a strong cast as the teenage and adult Ursula. McKenzie is fey enough to convey the strangeness Ursula accrues after a lifetime of lifetimes, yet solid enough to keep the character present and believable in her many realities. It’s a quietly bewitching performance from a remarkable actor who at just 21 is building an already-enviable career.

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Fleabag ’s Sian Clifford and Mare of Easttown ’s James McArdle play Ursula’s parents Sylvie and Hugh with spikiness and warmth, and subtle changes for each iteration of their odd daughter’s odd life. Downton Abbey ’s Jessica Brown Findlay is perfect as Ursula’s excitingly glamorous Aunt Izzie, a trailblazer of female independence, while Jessica Hynes is comic and tragic in turns as housekeeper Mrs Glover. There’s not a weak spot in the cast, skilfully directed by Brooklyn and True Detective John’s Crowley from a screenplay by Traitors and Boardwalk Empire writer and celebrated playwright Bash Doran.

As much as a portrait of Ursula’s fractal existence, Life After Life is also a picture of early 20 th -century England. Ursula’s lifespan takes the upper middle-class Todd family and their home Fox Corner through WWI, the influenza pandemic, into WWII and briefly beyond. She and her siblings – odious Maurice, practical Pamela, sweetheart Teddy and baby Jimmy, whose existence seems contingent on Ursula’s route through the multiverse – live against the backdrop of England in flux.

Happily, the adaptation – like the novel before it – channels History-with-a-big-H through characters that feel real. Something as alien and towering as a world war is told in terms of ordinary life, through chicken hutches and sad-looking birthday cakes and loss. Atkinson’s writing is spun with dry humour and a lack of sentimentality, which has been transferred directly to screen here. Overstatement is somehow resisted despite the story’s important structure and literal world-changing premise.

On that. Life After Life takes a thrilling swerve from confronting the risks posed by ordinary days and the extraordinary harm men can do to women, to venture into spy territory. That too, is handled with a delicate touch, not betraying the everyday grounding of the rest of the story and somehow anchoring an assassination plot against a world leader on solid ground.

Very few liberties have been taken with the source material, aside from some natural trimming of sub-plots. The motif of Ursula’s repeated deaths is rendered with spare beauty as snow begins to fall in her present before her corpse is seen as though at the bottom of what seems to be a depthless well. The novel alternately describes Ursula repeatedly folding into the reaching wings of an enormous black bat, which would seem a challenging image to translate. It’s all been handled with care and delicacy, and the end result retains Atkinson’s irresistible dialogue and delicate probing of life’s big questions.

It’s not an easy watch, especially for viewers who naturally fear the dangers lurking around dark corners. Grief abounds, but the necessarily painful path this drama takes leads to an ultimately uplifting and worthwhile conclusion.

All episodes of Life After Life are available to stream now on BBC iPlayer .

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Louisa Mellor | @Louisa_Mellor

Louisa Mellor is the Den of Geek UK TV Editor. She has written about TV, film and books for Den of Geek since 2010, and for…

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Life After Life, BBC Two review - déjà vu all over again | reviews, news & interviews

Life after life, bbc two review - déjà vu all over again, fine adaptation of kate atkinson's novel is touching and profound.

If we could keep living our life over and over again, would we get better at it? This is the premise underpinning Life After Life , the BBC ’s four-part adaptation of Kate Atkinson’s novel.

The story centres around Ursula Todd, as she grows up with parents Hugh and Sylvie (James McArdle and Sian Clifford) and assorted siblings in their home, Fox Corner. It’s an Edwardian rural idyll of lush gardens, the murmur of bees and teas on the lawn.

With a screenplay by Atkinson and Bathsheba Doran, and directed with painterly skill and a silky touch by John Crowley, Life After Life achieves its seemingly unreachable goals by anchoring its philosophical ambitions (and potentially preposterous string of deaths and resurrections) with some wonderful performances and absorbing narrative themes. Several performers play the different ages of Ursula, all of them excellent but with Thomasin McKenzie sticking most mesmerisingly in the mind as she embodies the young-adult Ursula, battling through a string of punishingly painful experiences. In one life-strand, she’s raped by an American called Howie, a friend from Oxford University of her older brother Maurice. The event and a subsequent abortion arranged by her dazzling Aunt Izzie (a champagne-fizzing performance from Jessica Brown Findlay) pitch her into a calamitous spiral of hard drinking and a terrible marriage to a psychotic con-man called Derek ( pictured below , Brown Findlay and Isla Johnston as young Ursula).

What does it all mean? Are our lives governed by an inscrutable, unknowable fate or some divine being, or is it all just chance and happenstance? Ursula’s older sister Pamela (Patsy Ferran) is in the latter camp – “a thing leads to a thing leads to a thing…” Her father Hugh, somehow serenely unscathed by his nightmarish experiences in the Great War, doesn’t say much, but he has found his own answer. “Take care of each other – that’s all I ask.” This is a drama that will haunt you, like a recurring dream.

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Life After Life — release date, cast interview, plot, trailer, first looks and all you need to know

Life After Life is a BBC2 drama starring Thomasin McKenzie which brings to life the famous novel by Kate Atkinson.

Life After Life arrives on BBC2 and poses the question to its viewers  ‘if you could live life time and time again, would you ever get it right?’ Power of The Dog actress Thomasin McKenzie play Ursula Todd, a woman who is born numerous times. Set against the backdrop of two World Wars, and based on the bestselling novel by Kate Atkinson , the BBC2 adaptation shows  Ursula living and dying in numerous circumstances. But what is it she needs to stay alive for? 

“I'm drawn to Life After Life because it makes me laugh, cry, clench my fists in anger or whoop with empowerment,’ says Thomasin McKenzie. “Bash (writer Bash Doran) has done a stunning job at adapting Kate Atkinson’s masterpiece.” 

The drama also stars Fleabag’s Sian Clifford and James McArdle as her original parents Sylvie and Hugh. Also look out for Jessica Hynes and Jessica Brown Findlay among the cast.

Here's everything you need to know about BBC2 drama Life After Life ...

Life After Life release date

Life After Life is a four-part drama that arrives on BBC2 on Tuesday, April 19 at 9pm, when all four episodes will also be available on BBCiPlayer. 

We'll update on when we hear if there's a worldwide or US air date.

Is there a Life After Life trailer?

Yes the BBC has released a trailer for Life After Life , so you can see how the story weaves through time and the main characters in action. Oh and you can see also how lovely this period drama looks. The drama was mostly filmed in and around Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK. 

Take a peek at the trailer below...

Life After Life plot 

Life After Life follows Ursula Todd (Thomasin McKenzie) who is born to Sylvie and Hugh (Sian Clifford and James McArdle) on February 11 1910 but dies before she draws her first breath. However, on the same night, Ursula is reborn and this time she survives. Time and time again she dies but is born again into a new life, but what does it all mean? 

The drama follows Ursula as she navigates each life during a critical time in our history, which encompasses  two world wars and an encounter with Hitler. Her journey probes whether a perfect life can ever be lived and if the course of history can truly be changed. Ursula’s apparently infinite amount of lives give her the power to save the world but even if she can, will she? 

Life After Life cast — Thomasin McKenzie, Sian Clifford and James McArdle

Meet the lead cast in Life After Life ...

Thomasin McKenzie as Ursula     Kiwi actress Thomasin played Lola in last year’s hit movie The Power of the Dog , which starred Benedict Cumberbatch and Kirsten Dunst. Before that she starred as Elsa, a Jewish girl forced to hide from the Nazis, in the powerful comedy Jojo Rabbit. Thomasin has also had roles in Last Night In Soho, Old and Leave No Trace. Scroll below for an interview with Thomasin.

Sian Clifford as Sylvie Todd  Sian is best known for playing Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s sister Claire in the popular coemdy series Fleabag . She also appeared in the series Vanity Fair and Two Weeks to Live . She played fraudster Diana Ingram in ITV's Quiz , which was about the couple who tried to cheat their way to winning £1 million on the quiz show Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? Sian has also starred in Inside No.9 and His Dark Materials .  Sian says: "The relationship between Ursula and Sylvie is so beautifully written by Kate, and by Bash Doran, our wonderful screenwriter. Because it’s so complex, I really believe it as a mother/daughter relationship. What’s beautiful about this story is that it has different outcomes depending on the choices that either one of them make. It shifts their identities sometimes, so there are versions of Sylvie that are completely different in certain lives and that is absolutely what fascinated me about this character. Plus to examine who we become depending on decisions that we make, but also that other people make."

James McArdle as Hugh Todd James played Deacon Mark Burton in the series Mare of Easttown , alongside Kate Winslet. He also starred as Niv Lek in Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens and as The Earl of Moray in Mary Queen of Scots . James has also starred in Love & Marriage , New Worlds , Man In An Orange Shirt and Ammonite , the movie about fossil hunter Mary Anning.  James says: "Hugh is Ursula’s father and we meet him at 29 but goes  through to 60. I was horrified that they were more concerned with making me look twenty nine than sixty! Hugh ends up having five children. He gets called up for war service in World War One and it really changes him. In a weird way I think he’s one of the characters that deals with the changes of life better because all he cares about is his family due to the war. For Hugh, his resolve becomes much more about keeping this family together and it’s all he cares about. He’s a selfless, gracious man and there are lot of Todd’s!"

Who else is starring in Life After Life? 

In Life After Life look out for Years and Years star Jessica Hynes (also W1A , The Witchfinder ) who will play Mrs Glover while Jessica Brown Findlay ( Brave New World , Downton Abbey ) will also star as Izzie. They are joined by Patsy Ferran ( Black Narcissus ) as Pamela Todd, Harry Michell ( Yesterday ) and Maurice Todd, Laurie Kynaston ( The Trouble With Maggie Cole ) as Jimmy, Joshua Hill ( Small Axe ) as Derek Oliphant, Maria Laird ( Derry Girls ) as Bridget, Sean Delaney ( Killing Eve ) as Teddy Todd and Ron Cook as Dr Fellowes.

Thomasin McKenzie on playing Ursula in Life After Life

What's your take on Life After Life? "It’s hard to explain but Life After Life is basically centered around reincarnation and we follow a young girl called Ursula from the moment she’s born up until the moment she dies. She goes through life multiple times and we see how each of her lives changes depending on specific events or moments in her life, and the decisions she makes based off her instincts." 

What was it about the book that struck you and why do you think this story connects with people?  " I learned when we were filming that a lot of people have read the book and really love it. So it’s a good question as to why so many people have responded so strongly to it. I think it’s the idea of reincarnation in general as it’s interesting – the idea that it opens up the possibility of reliving or fixing past mistakes or living your happiest moments again. The reason I responded to it so strongly is that I’m always someone who lives in the past; constantly regretting things and cringing at things I’ve done and wish I hadn’t!"

There would have been days of filming where you would have had to go through every emotion; joy, trauma... What was that like for you as an actor?  " It’s a really tough thing as some days I would turn up on set and not realize how intense some of the scenes would be. I didn’t take into account how much that would affect the other scenes we were doing that day that might be lighter or from one of Ursula’s different lives. It was quite hard, both mentally and physically, to go through so much and so many emotions in one day. You just don’t have as much time to recover from it with such a crazy schedule." 

How involved do you get as an actor in the look of your characters?  " There were lots and lots of looks – the hair and make-up department play a huge part in creating the character and Sinead [Kidao] and Konnie [Daniels] did such a wonderful job. I wouldn’t be able to play Ursula in my own clothing, my own accent and without a 1940’s fancy sculptural hairdo. Sinead was so generous and collaborative and asked my opinion on if I thought Ursula would like to wear something. I was really interested in the color palette for each of the characters; for Ursula it was green and maroon-red. Konnie has incredible knowledge of the period; it was really cool to see how they worked."

Even though it’s a period piece, why do you think it’s still so contemporary and relevant?  " That’s a good question; you see a theme from the pressure of society that particularly weighed down Sylvie and Ursula. I think you still kind of see that societal pressure coming through these days as well." 

Do you think Ursula is a modern woman? Is she born out of her time?  " I think in some of her lives she is and in some lives, she isn’t. In some of her lives, she really struggles with the idea of what it is to be a mum and what it is to be a wife and whether that’s something she wants or not. Back then, that was something that was expected and maybe if she was born now, it wouldn’t have been (although still is) as much pressure for that to have been her life." 

Life After Life – all about the novel 

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson was published in 2013 and is the first of two novels about the Todd family. The second, A God In Ruins , was released in 2015. Life After Life won numerous accolades, including Waterstone’s Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the 2013 Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction. Kate’s debut novel was Behind the Scenes at the Museum in 1995 and she’s since written numerous works including Human Croquet, Emotional Weird , Case Histories and One Good Turn . She also wrote the treatment for the TV series The Catch .

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After Life review – an ode to precious moments and stage management

Dorfman, London Jack Thorne’s adaptation of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s film about dead souls living out eternal memories is charmingly done

T he last year has been one awful thing after another. It’s a relief, then, to spend some time thinking of the very best of times. In Jack Thorne’s After Life, adapted from the award-winning 1998 film by Hirokazu Kore-eda , the newly deceased get to pick the one memory they would like to live out for eternity.

Bunny Christie’s set design lines the back wall of the Dorfman from top to toe with filing cabinets. In this co-production with Headlong , the afterlife is not heaven or hell, but a retro, greyscale office. Over the course of the evening, we see a week of work in this bureaucratic limbo, as the dead (the “guided”) worry over which memory to pick, while the official team (the “guides”) work out how best to recreate them.

It’s a great idea, charmingly done. The cast are superb at drawing out the tender moments as they describe the fragile memories they’d like to keep, with envy radiating out of those who can’t pass over themselves. But once the rules have been explained, the show doesn’t really have anywhere to go; it’s all a little obvious, rather lacking in subtext. The world-building is limited to this site. Thorne’s writing is plain and uncluttered, with the philosophical, ethical and moral debates about life and death worn on every sharp-suited sleeve.

There are sparks of brilliance in Jeremy Herrin’s staging – spelling out the days of the week as we flip through the calendar with increasing creativity, climbing out of the floor as if by magic – but overall, it’s far gentler, and perhaps more strait-laced, than you might expect from Headlong.

Although After Life is based on a film, its best parts are pure theatre. The performers play with the liveness and the artificiality of recreating a memory. Drop those petals a little slower, fly that plane a little faster. As they rebuild the precious moments people have painstakingly picked, the show almost becomes an ode to stage management. After all, one of the guides says of their team: “We make the impossible happen here, don’t we?”

At the Dorfman, National Theatre, London, until 7 August .

• National Theatre
• Jack Thorne
• Bunny Christie

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