Winner of the Specsavers UK Author of the Year 2013.
Chosen by the prestigious Kirkus Reviews as one of 10 titles in 2013 that ‘will sweep you off your feet’
Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2013.
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.
Click below to listen to an extract from the audiobook edition of this title.
What if you could live again and again, until you got it right?
On a cold and snowy night in 1910, Ursula Todd is born to an English banker and his wife. She dies before she can draw her first breath. On that same cold and snowy night, Ursula Todd is born, lets out a lusty wail, and embarks upon a life that will be, to say the least, unusual. For as she grows, she also dies, repeatedly, in a variety of ways, while the young century marches on towards its second cataclysmic world war.
Does Ursula's apparently infinite number of lives give her the power to save the world from its inevitable destiny? And if she can -- will she?
Named a New York Times Best Book of the Century, Life After Life is darkly comic, startlingly poignant, and utterly original: this is Kate Atkinson at her absolute best.
'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
'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,no1 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
'Atkinson’s ninth novel, set against some of the 20th century’s most turbulent events, is stylish, inventive and beautifully written.' -- Daily Express
Author
About Kate Atkinson
Kate Atkinson won the Whitbread (now Costa) Book of the Year prize with her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, and has been a critically acclaimed writer ever since. Her four bestselling novels featuring former detective Jackson Brodie became the BBC television series Case Histories, starring Jason Isaacs. Her latest novel Life After Life was shortlisted for several prestigious literary prizes including the Women’s (formerly Orange) and the Costa Novel Prize. She was appointed MBE in the 2011 Queen’s Birthday Honours List.
Kate Atkinson was born in York and now lives in Edinburgh.
What if you could live again and again, until you got it right?
On a cold and snowy night in 1910, Ursula Todd is born to an English banker and his wife. She dies before she can draw her first breath. On that same cold and snowy night, Ursula Todd is born, lets out a lusty wail, and embarks upon a life that will be, to say the least, unusual. For as she grows, she also dies, repeatedly, in a variety of ways, while the young century marches on towards its second cataclysmic world war.
Does Ursula's apparently infinite number of lives give her the power to save the world from its inevitable destiny? And if she can -- will she?
Named a New York Times Best Book of the Century, Life After Life is darkly comic, startlingly poignant, and utterly original: this is Kate Atkinson at her absolute best.
Life After Life features in the following genres: Audiobooks of the Month, eBooks of the Month, Recommendations, General Fiction, Historical Fiction, Modern and Contemporary Fiction, Fiction
Life After Life is available in Paperback, Ebook, Hardback, Audiobook
Life After Life was written by Kate Atkinson and published by Little, Brown and Company
Life After Life has 560 pages
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