The King's English Bookshop

The setting is a sprawling English country house, the time frame the early years of the last century. After a brief scene in 1930 in which Hitler appears, the reader is taken back in time to 1910 and the birth and immediate death of the infant Ursula. No sooner have we digested this than the clock is reset, and she is born again, this time to be saved by the arrival of the doctor. At age 5 Ursula is swallowed by a wave and then given back, and at age 16 an event takes her on still another path toward death—yet the course of her destiny is once more reversed.  Confusing? A bit. But exhilarating too, as Kate Atkinson cants the earth on its axis for us, forcing us to consider the cataclysmic changes wrought by seemingly random events—in terms of our personal lives, and in the end, of world history. Life after Life is dazzling—wickedly funny, vastly entertaining, and utterly world-shaking.