Book Club Guide

Life After Life

by Kate Atkinson · 2013 · Literary Fiction

Key themes

If you could do it again — and again — and again
England in the Second World War as a life lived in parallel
The self that persists across all its versions

About this book

Ursula Todd is born in 1910 and dies — and is born again, and dies again — repeatedly, each life varying slightly from the last. Living through the same decades of the 20th century in different ways, she is moved closer and closer to a specific moment that might change everything. Atkinson's formally inventive novel asks what we would do if we could do it again.

Published in 2013, Life After Life won the British Book Award for Novel of the Year and the South Bank Sky Arts Award. Atkinson spent years on the concept, working out how to write the same life multiple times without the reader losing interest.

Discussion questions

Ursula dies repeatedly and is reborn without memory, but something accumulates — she begins to make different choices. What is Atkinson saying about the self: is there a continuous identity across all these lives?
The novel spans the same decades repeatedly with variations. How does Atkinson generate interest across iterations — and does any version feel more 'real' than the others?
The Second World War is the novel's dominant historical frame. How does living through the same war multiple times change what the novel can say about it?
The ending is ambiguous about whether Ursula has achieved what she was working toward. How do you read it — as resolution, as another beginning, or as something deliberately open?
Life After Life is ambitious enough that some critics found it technically impressive but emotionally cold. How did you experience it — as moving, as a puzzle, or as something in between?