Each time Ursula dies, Atkinson - a British writer best known here as the author of “Case Histories,” the first in a series of highly entertaining mysteries featuring the sleuth Jackson Brodie - resurrects her and sets her on one of the many alternate courses that her destiny might have taken.Ī great deal of experience, and 20th-century history, transpires in the intervals separating Ursula’s sudden and often violent exits from the world of the living. She is killed during the German bombing of London in World War II and ends her life in the ruins of Berlin in 1945. Later, she commits suicide and is murdered. As a child, she drowns, falls off a roof and contracts influenza. She dies when she is being born, on a snowy night in 1910. Its heroine, Ursula Todd, keeps dying, then dying again. But the one-time-only nature of death is anything but self-evident in Kate Atkinson’s new novel, “Life After Life.” “After the first death, there is no other,” Dylan Thomas wrote.
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