Life After Life

Life After Life is a 2013 novel by Kate Atkinson and the first of her two books about the Todd family. Its structure is what most readers remember: Ursula Todd is born on 11 February 1910 near Chalfont St Peter, is strangled by her umbilical cord and stillborn in the first version, and then begins again, with the novel looping back to describe different possible lives for the same person.

The variations run through an upper-middle-class English childhood and then into the war, and each version leaves something behind, so Ursula carries an unexplained caution towards events she has already lived through. Atkinson uses the device to examine the ordinary contingencies of a life, and the second half places her in London during the Blitz.

The book was widely praised on publication and was followed by A God in Ruins, which follows her brother Teddy. Atkinson's interest is in history as something that could have gone otherwise at a hundred points, and she lets the same family be ruined and survive without settling which version is supposed to count.