Life After Life

Life After Life is a work of adult historical fiction written by acclaimed British author Kate Atkinson and published in 2013. Atkinson’s debut novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won the Whitbread Book of the Year prize and her subsequent novels have all been international bestsellers, including the mystery series featuring Jackson Brodie, which has been adapted to a BBC show.

Other works by this author include Case Histories, A God in Ruins, and Shrines of Gaiety.

Life After Life explores tumultuous events of the mid-20th century, particularly the two world wars, through the repeating life of Ursula Todd, who, each time she dies, is reborn in the same time and place to the same family. Through Ursula’s successive lives, and the choices she makes to correct or prevent disaster, the novel explores the themes of Fate and Choice, The Search for Meaning, and The Tension Between Activism and Acceptance against the larger philosophical questions of how an individual life can be measured within the broader tapestry of history, fate, and circumstance.

This guide uses the Back Bay trade paperback edition published in 2014.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide discuss instances of sexual violence, domestic violence, death by suicide, termination of a pregnancy, and child loss.

Plot Summary

In the opening scene, Ursula Todd enters a German café in November 1930 and pulls a gun on Adolf Hitler.

Immediately following, Ursula Beresford Todd is born on February 11, 1910, to an upper-middle-class British family living outside London, England. When she is stillborn, strangled by the umbilical cord around her neck, she is born again. This time the doctor snips the cord and saves Ursula’s life.

Ursula lives until age five when she drowns on a seaside holiday in Cornwall, and the novel returns to her birth. She begins another life, ended by a fall out of a window when she is a child. She dies several times during the influenza epidemic of 1918, each time being born again. Feeling haunted by the sense of foreboding around certain events, Ursula begins to make different choices that will extend her life, for instance finding ways to prevent their maid, Bridget, from attending the armistice celebrations so she will not contract the flu and bring it home to Fox Corner.

Ursula’s attempt to injure their maid leads her family to set her up with a psychiatrist, Dr. Kellet, who speaks to Ursula of reincarnation and amor fati, the notion of accepting one’s fate, whatever that may be. Ursula’s carefree and self-indulgent aunt Izzy contrasts with her mother, Sylvie, who believes that a woman’s highest calling is to be a wife and mother. In a particularly brutal life, Ursula is raped at 16 by her brother’s friend and nearly dies of infection after Izzy arranges an abortion, an experience that leads her to question the purpose of life. She seeks safety with a swift marriage to Derek Oliphant, a schoolteacher she meets on the street, only to find Derek controlling and abusive. After he kills her in a vicious attack when she tries to leave him, a reborn Ursula fights off her brother’s friend the first time he tries to kiss her. She also acts on her sense of foreboding and saves her young neighbor, Nancy Shawcross, the sweetheart of Ursula’s beloved younger brother Teddy, from being attacked and killed by a transient man.

Yet these choices hardly set Ursula up for a better life. When World War II begins, Ursula’s job with the Home Office puts her in the middle of the London Blitz, where she is several times killed in November 1940 by a bomb or, alternately, a falling building. In another version, she survives the war only to be gassed in her sleep by a faulty stove in 1947, in a war-wrecked London where she has been contemplating the toll of the war, the concentration camps, and Teddy’s death as a pilot.

In one reborn life, Ursula learns from her elder brother, Maurice, how to shoot a gun. In another, she travels to Germany after university and, while staying with a warm and lively German family, meets a handsome blond named Jürgen, marries him, and has a daughter, Frieda. When Frieda’s lungs are damaged by pneumonia, Ursula accepts the invitation from her friend Eva, who is now mistress to Adolf Hitler, to stay with them in Hitler’s mountain retreat. When World War II begins, Ursula is trapped in Germany, and loses her husband and her home. In April 1945, as Frieda is ill and the Soviet army advancing, Ursula gives herself and her daughter poison to end their suffering. In choosing death, Ursula fears she has destroyed her unique power and this will truly be the end of her.

However, it isn’t. In the next timeline, Ursula volunteers with a rescue group that visits incident sites after bombings during the London Blitz. She encounters new love affairs and new friendships, particularly with Miss Woolf, a retired hospital matron whose fortitude Ursula comes to admire and respect. Ursula survives the war and lives long enough to see Pamela’s children grow to adulthood, while Pamela herself becomes the matriarch of Fox Corner. However, she also experiences the death of her father and the grief of knowing Teddy was shot down during the war, and robbed of the life he should have had.

Ursula begins to wonder what death means when, for her, it is not an end but a new beginning. In one timeline, her aunt Izzy doesn’t give up the baby she had at 16, but instead, Sylvie adopts the boy. Roland, however, dies by drowning while the family vacations in Cornwall. Ursula feels burdened and bewildered by the premonitions that plague her and is sent by the family to a private clinic for care. There, she determines that she will use her unique gift to train as an assassin, embed herself in Germany, and kill Hitler. When she murders Hitler in a Munich café, Ursula herself is killed, and everything resets.

Over the course of the novel, Ursula’s recursive lives lead her to question the consequences of human choice and the various ways people find meaning in their lives. Given the chance to change her life over and over, Ursula develops a deeper understanding of the power of human love and attachment. In the penultimate scene, Teddy and a fellow prisoner of war make their way back to England. Nancy and Ursula meet them at a pub. As he and Nancy joyfully reunite, Teddy mouths “thank you” to Ursula, as if she were responsible for giving them a future.

Then, in the final scene, the midwife who was meant to attend Ursula’s birth enjoys a sip of rum at an inn and is told she’s not going anywhere for a while due to the snow, suggesting that Ursula’s lives may cycle on endlessly even after the novel ends. In probing reincarnation, the nature of life and death, the power of human choice, and the limits of human control, the novel dramatizes philosophical questions about the nature of human experience and the values by which we measure a life.