About the Book
What if you had the chance to live your life again and again, until you finally got it right?
During a snowstorm in England in 1910, a baby is born and dies before she can take her first breath.
During a snowstorm in England in 1910, the same baby is born and lives to tell the tale.
What if there were second chances? And third chances? In fact an infinite number of chances to live your life? Would you eventually be able to save the world from its own inevitable destiny? And would you even want to?
Life After Life follows Ursula Todd as she lives through the turbulent events of the last century again and again. With wit and compassion, Kate Atkinson finds warmth even in life’s bleakest moments, and shows an extraordinary ability to evoke the past. Here she is at her most profound and inventive, in a novel that celebrates the best and worst of ourselves.
Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Be Ye Men of Valour
November 1930
Snow
11 February 1910
Snow
11 February 1910
Four Seasons Fill the Measure of the Year
11 February 1910, May 1910, June 1914
Snow
11 February 1910
War
June 1914, July 1914, January 1915
Snow
11 February 1910
War
20 January 1915
Armistice
June 1918, 11 November 1918
Snow
11 February 1910
Armistice
12 November 1918
Snow
11 February 1910
Armistice
11 November 1918
Snow
11 February 1910
Armistice
11 November 1918
Snow
11 February 1910
Armistice
11 November 1918
Peace
February 1947
Snow
11 February 1910
Like a Fox in a Hole
September 1923, December 1923, 11 February 1926, May 1926, August 1926, June 1932, 11 February 1926, August 1926
A Lovely Day Tomorrow
2 September 1939, November 1940
A Lovely Day Tomorrow
2 September 1939, April 1940, November 1940
A Lovely Day Tomorrow
September 1940, November 1940, August 1926
The Land of Begin Again
August 1933, August 1939, April 1945
A Long Hard War
September 1940, October 1940, October 1940, November 1940, May 1941, November 1943, February 1947, June 1967
The End of the Beginning
Be Ye Men of Valour
December 1930
Snow
11 February 1910
The Broad Sunlit Uplands
May 1945
Snow
11 February 1910
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Kate Atkinson
Copyright
Life After Life
Kate Atkinson
For Elissa
What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more’ … Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Everything changes and nothing remains still.
Plato, Cratylus
‘What if we had a chance to do it again and again,
until we finally did get it right? Wouldn’t that be wonderful?’
Edward Beresford Todd
Be Ye Men of Valour
November 1930
A FUG OF tobacco smoke and damp clammy air hit her as she entered the café. She had come in from the rain and drops of water still trembled like delicate dew on the fur coats of some of the women inside. A regiment of white-aproned waiters rushed around at tempo, serving the needs of the Münchner at leisure – coffee, cake and gossip.
He was at a table at the far end of the room, surrounded by the usual cohorts and toadies. There was a woman she had never seen before – a permed, platinum blonde with heavy make-up – an actress by the look of her. The blonde lit a cigarette, making a phallic performance out of it. Everyone knew that he preferred his women demure and wholesome, Bavarian preferably. All those dirndls and knee-socks, God help us.
The table was laden. Bienenstich, Gugelhupf, Käsekuchen. He was eating a slice of Kirschtorte. He loved his cakes. No wonder he looked so pasty, she was surprised he wasn’t diabetic. The softly repellent body (she imagined pastry) beneath the clothes, never exposed to public view. Not a manly man. He smiled when he caught sight of her and half rose, saying, ‘Guten Tag, gnädiges Fräulein,’ indicating the chair next to him. The bootlicker who was currently occupying it jumped up and moved away.
‘Unsere Englische Freundin,’ he said to the blonde, who blew cigarette smoke out slowly and examined her without any interest before eventually saying, ‘Guten Tag.’ A Berliner.
She placed her handbag, heavy with its cargo, on the floor next to her chair and ordered Schokolade. He insisted that she try the Pflaumen Streusel.
‘Es regnet,’ she said by way of conversation. ‘It’s raining.’
‘Yes, it’s raining,’ he said with a heavy accent. He laughed, pleased at his attempt. Everyone else at the table laughed as well. ‘Bravo,’ someone said. ‘Sehr gutes Englisch.’ He was in a good mood, tapping the back of his index finger against his lips with an amused smile as if he was listening to a tune in his head.
The Streusel was delicious.
‘Entschuldigung,’ she murmured, reaching down into her bag and delving for a handkerchief. Lace corners, monogrammed with her initials, ‘UBT’ – a birthday present from Pammy. She dabbed politely at the Streusel flakes on her lips and then bent down again to put the handkerchief back in her bag and retrieve the weighty object nesting there. Her father’s old service revolver from the Great War, a Webley Mark V.
A move rehearsed a hundred times. One shot. Swiftness was all, yet there was a moment, a bubble suspended in time after she had drawn the gun and levelled it at his heart when everything seemed to stop.
‘Führer,’ she said, breaking the spell. ‘Für Sie.’
Around the table guns were jerked from holsters and pointed at her. One breath. One shot.
Ursula pulled the trigger.
Darkness fell.
Snow
11 February 1910
AN ICY RUSH of air, a freezing slipstream on the newly exposed skin. She is, with no warning, outside the inside and the familiar wet, tropical world has suddenly evaporated. Exposed to the elements. A prawn peeled, a nut shelled.
No breath. All the world come down to this. One breath.
Little lungs, like dragonfly wings failing to inflate in the foreign atmosphere. No wind in the strangled pipe. The buzzing of a thousand bees in the tiny curled pearl of an ear.