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Still later iterations of Ursula's life take her into World War II, where she works in London for the War Office and repeatedly witnesses the results of the Blitz including a direct hit on a bomb shelter in Argyll Road in November 1940 - with herself being among the victims in some lives and among the rescuers in others. The saved Nancy would have an important role in Ursula's later life(s), forming a deep love relationship with Ursula's brother Teddy, and would become a main character in the sequel, A God in Ruins. In between, she also uses her half-memory of earlier lives to avert the neighbour girl Nancy being raped and murdered by a child molester. In later lives she averts all this by being preemptively aggressive to the would-be rapist.

Then there is an unhappy life where she is traumatized by being raped, getting pregnant and undergoing an illegal abortion, and finally becoming trapped in a highly oppressive marriage, and being killed by her abusive husband when trying to escape. Then there are several sequences when she falls victim to the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 - which repeats itself again and again, though she already has a foreknowledge of it, and only her fourth attempt to avert catching the flu succeeds. In later iterations of her life she dies as a child - drowning in the sea, or when saved from that, by falling to her death from the roof when trying to retrieve a fallen doll. In the first version, she is strangled by her umbilical cord and stillborn.

(Both the Spanish flu and the Third Reich figure prominently in the cyclical plot lines reading this during the COVID-19 pandemic, in the wake of the Trump presidency, made the novel all too unnervingly relatable.) Certain seasoned science fiction readers will likely be churlish about a mainstream novelist parlaying classic SF ideas into literary street cred, but I’m not one of them Atkinson’s take seems just as valid as anyone else’s, and is likely more entertaining than most.The novel has an unusual structure, repeatedly looping back in time to describe alternative possible lives for its central character, Ursula Todd, who is born on 11 February 1910 to an upper-middle-class family near Chalfont St Peter in Buckinghamshire. This last element contributes greatly to the novel’s gut-wrenching emotional impact, and seems all the more timely now in light of the chilling parallels between modern times and yesteryear. She leverages them to great effect, particularly in the way she reflects on the toxic gender dynamics of the era, and the apocalyptic wartime suffering Ursula is forced to suffer across multiple timelines. Even if she doesn’t seem particularly interested in the skiffy mechanics of the idea, Atkinson still benefits from the speculative what-if scenarios that result. Life After Life leverages its semi-science fictional premise well enough, but it’s easy to see how it escapes the genre label, since the focus is less on the gimmick than on the more mundane furniture of the world(s): chiefly, the family life at Ursula’s childhood home of Fox Corner, and the violent history of 20th century Europe. This becomes especially important, of course, when one timeline sends her overseas on a language-learning year abroad, during which she befriends a German shopgirl by the name of Eva Braun - eventually steering Ursula toward a fateful showdown with the world’s most famous genocidal sociopath. Eventually, though, the timelines start to bleed together across the hazy landscape of Ursula’s memory, as flashes of deja vu arrive like premonitions, prompting her to change course to avert disaster. Most of Ursula’s lives transpire in isolation from one another, and for the first hundred pages or so, the novel largely reads like a study in cause and effect, spooling out story to key diversion points, then rewinding to examine ways things might have gone differently. Ursula’s first life is short, but then she’s born again, and again, the various and sundry iterations of her existence playing out against the dramatic backdrop of twentieth-century Europe. A richly designed, lightly fantastical historical, it’s about Ursula Todd, born in England in 1910 during an epic snowstorm. Life After Life (2013) will not surprise science fiction fans, but it might please them, as it will Atkinson’s many mainstream readers. If an author is to be afforded the luxury of combining two truly shopworn tropes - the Groundhog Day reincarnation loop and the time-traveling Hitler murder - I suppose it might as well be one with as much skill, humor, and effortless readability as Kate Atkinson.