 life after life by kate atkinson this novel is a slow burner usually kate atkinson grabs me by the throat before i m halfway down the first page and doesn t relent till the book is done not so with life after life  but stick with it and you ll be ridiculously rewarded the novel follows the many lives of ursula todd she suffers relentless deaths but is reincarnated as herself to try again and again finally scraping through childhood into her teenage years and beyond ursula is only vaguely aware of her remarkable gift which manifests itself in her ordinary life as flashes of déjà vu or maddening anxiety provoking troubled trips to a psychiatrist in one life the family maid bridget goes off to london to celebrate the end of the great war but unwittingly brings the deadly flu back home on the train in the subsequent reincarnation ursula is racked with terror at the thought of bridget going off to london and so pushes her spraining her ankle and averting her destined contact with the fluraddled crowds ursula is saved this time but death is always just around the corner as is another go at living life it takes several attempts for ursula to dodge the dangers and diseases of an edwardian childhood and it is only once she reaches her young adulthood that the novel takes flight until then there is a tinge of frustration at always having the narrative reset to 1910 whilst ursula makes another attempt at surviving her early years so there is often scant sense of a story moving forward and the narrative fails to build up a head of steam the structure also made it difficult to develop a sense of ursula s character as we spend so much time seeing her as a baby or toddler trying to emerge unscathed from childhood also in one life she may become a dreary suburban wife but in another she is leading a glamorous existence in weimar germany so who is ursula it s often hard to know as she sprints off to so many different destinies the novel finally sparks into life when ursula arrives in london during the blitz finally she is grounded and solid and though we have several versions of her life and death in this era we are at last allowed to stay with her long enough in the same frightening but familiar setting to know her the constant stopstarts are replaced by beautifully elongated snapshots of life instead of living a few seconds before being strangled by her umbilical cord or a few hours before being smothered by a cat she steps into fuller life finally we re going somewhere the constantly zigzagging line of the narrative has now steadied and sharpened and is aiming towards a great finale kate atkinson s descriptive strengths are best displayed in these blitz sections and we feel she too knows that this is the novel s finest hour we are treated to some splendid though disturbing imagery as ursula works to remove corpses after a raid she lifts a body by the shoulders only to see him come apart like a christmas cracker so atkinson devotees like me may feel they have a damp squib on their hands but stick with it and it ll soon sparkle into literary brilliance life after life is published on march 14th by doubleday book review kate atkinson archive a 