The permutations of Ursula span both World Wars and are influenced by the influencers of her family, particularly her siblings. She is a literary character seemingly invented just to illustrate, if not answer, one of the oldest and most potentially regret-inducing questions of all time: What if I could live my life all over again?

And so goes the entire book and Ursula's many and varied lives. She enters the world for the first time stillborn, but survives her birth in the very next chapter due to a slight change in chronology and weather В– a doctor makes it through a snowstorm just in time in the second version. Ursula, the story's unlikely heroine, is born and then diesВ…and then is born again in February 1910. Yes, the book exceeds the five hundred-page mark and thus requires a certain commitment, but the long and sometimes exhausting mental journey springs primarily from Atkinson's cleverness in using unconventional structure to her advantage В– the pathway of the repeated lives of protagonist Ursula Todd. Ursula Todd, the protagonist in Kate Atkinson's Life After Life, is a literary character seemingly invented just to illustrate, if not answer, the oldest questions of all time: What if I could live my life all over again?ДЄs a fan of Kate Atkinson's inventive fiction, I should have known what I was getting myself into when I tackled reviewing her latest novel, Life After Life.

Life after life book cover