Description: Life After Life Hardcover – Deckle Edge, April 2 2013by Kate Atkinson (Author) Here is Kate Atkinson at her most profound and inventive, in a novel that celebrates the best and worst of ourselves. 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, she finds warmth even in life's bleakest moments, and shows an extraordinary ability to evoke the past. Product descriptionReviewNational BestsellerA New York Times BestsellerWinner of the 2013 Costa Book AwardShortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction"There aren't enough breathless adjectives to describe Life After Life: Dazzling, witty, moving, joyful, mournful, profound. Wildly inventive, deeply felt. Hilarious. Humane. Simply put: it's one of the best novels I've read this century." —Gillian Flynn, bestselling author of Gone Girl and Sharp Objects "Think of Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife or David Nicholls' One Day. . . . [or] Martin Amis' Times Arrow. . . . Life After Life should have the popular success of the former and deserves to win prizes, too. Atkinson has done something highly unusual, boldly beginning afresh. . . . [Atkinson] sets herself an audacious premise and the most ambitious sweep of our modern history, and absolutely nails it on every count. It both pleases the crowd and feeds the soul, in the spirit of the grand masters." —The Times (UK) "In a lesser writer's hands, a novel that revisits its main character's birth 12 times would likely be tiresome, but each revision is fresh, often funny, and filled with new life in more ways than one. Atkinson tackles a mystical theme in Life After Life, but she is at heart a realist." —Maclean’s"Merging family saga with a fluid sense of time and an extraordinarily vivid sense of history at its most human level. A dizzying and dazzling tour de force." —Daily Mail (UK)"Brilliant . . . more than just a terrific story about the impact of one existence on another. Atkinson can knock the socks off any rival in terms of skill and style. . . . The tour de force of the book, though, is Atkinson's recreation of the Blitz . . . unputdownable." —Evening Standard (UK)"Startlingly brilliant . . . endlessly rich." —Reader's Digest"Life After Life is to be applauded for its inventiveness, and for reminding us of lives vanished without trace or memory in the waste and monstrosity of war." —Literary Review"Kate Atkinson's new novel is a box of delights. Ingenious in construction, indefatigably entertaining, it grips the reader's imagination on the first page and never lets go. If you wish to be moved and astonished, read it. And if you want to give a dazzling present, buy it for your friends." —Hilary Mantel, award-winning author of Wolf Hall"At heart this is a war story . . . and in its focus on the women and civilians usually overlooked or downplayed, it gives the Blitz its full measure of terror. . . . [Atkinson's] found an inventive way to make both the war's toll and the pull of alternate history, of darkness avoided or diminished, fresh." —Publishers Weekly"Provocative, entertaining and beautifully written." —Kirkus Reviews"Atkinson’s world is cruelly arbitrary yet also exultantly resurgent. . . . Atkinson packs a huge emotional punch with fluency of language and poetical leitmotifs from Donne to Keats. As with Martin Amis' Time’s Arrow and Ian McEwan's Atonement, she explores the kaleidoscopic paradoxes of 'what if'." —The Telegraph (UK) "Much of the (very considerable) pleasure of this almost deliriously inventive, sharply imagined and ultimately affecting novel lies in the almost spookily vivid atmosphere and pathos that Atkinson manages to extract from all this Groundhog Day repetition. . . . Atkinson's knack for retelling—what to repeat, what to change, what to leave out—is satisfyingly faultless. Most of all, though, there's an odd exhilaration in the sheer number and the build-up. . . . Atkinson has written something that amounts to so much more than the sum of its (very many) parts." —The Guardian (UK) "Life After Life is ultimately centered on the brutal British experience of World War II, with characters caught in the blitz and Ursula joining a rescue unit for injured civilians. As powerful as the rest of Life After Life is, its lengthy evocation of this nightmare is gutsy and deeply disturbing, just as the author intends it to be." —The New York Times"It takes a brilliant author to keep things interesting while telling the same story over and over. . . . [Atkinson] goes deep into the minds of her characters, while creating readable, intelligent and quirky books. . . . [Atkinson's novels] are thought-provoking and filled with complex characters, classical references and subtle hints. Her latest, Life After Life, is all of that. . . . Atkinson's rendering of the war is vivid, heartbreaking and staggering. . . . [A] brilliant novel, written in a lighthearted style, but with great depth." —The Vancouver Sun "There's a bit of Edward Gorey-esque glee in the way Kate Atkinson keeps knocking off her main character in Life After Life. And yet, she manages to invest these repeated deaths with poetry and emotion. . . . [An] ingenious narrative conceit. . . . with Life After Life, Atkinson has crafted a narrative that pushes us to think about our own choices. . . . Along the way, there is a delight in the essence of this unusual fiction." —Los Angeles Times "Atkinson is a master, weaving together the many strands of the story, making each narrative as compelling as the last. The tale is enriched with literary references and philosophies introduced by the characters in easily digestible forms." —Chatelaine "It is in [the Todds'] poignant constancy that Atkinson excels at deploying her sharp wit, her keen grasp of character and her mastery of narrative irony. . . . If you could go back immediately and read a dazzling, intricate and entertaining novel a second time to catch some of the storytelling magic you missed the first, would you? If the book is Atkinson's Life After Life, then why not?" —San Francisco ChronicleAbout the AuthorKATE ATKINSON won the Whitbread (now Costa) Book of the Year Prize with her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, and has been a critically acclaimed international author ever since. Her most recent four bestsellers featured the former private detective Jackson Brodie: Case Histories, One Good Turn, When Will There Be Good News? and Started Early, Took My Dog. She was appointed an MBE in the 2011 Queen's Birthday Honours List. Product detailsPublisher : Bond Street Books; First Edition (April 2 2013)Language : EnglishHardcover : 480 pagesISBN-10 : 0385671377ISBN-13 : 978-0385671378Item weight : 709 gDimensions : 16.76 x 3.05 x 23.62 cm
Price: 9.99 CAD
Location: Coquitlam, British Columbia
End Time: 2024-11-12T19:58:52.000Z
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Book Title: Life After Life
Book Series: Todd Family
Narrative Type: Fiction
Publisher: Bond Street Books
Original Language: English
Intended Audience: Young Adults, Adults
Publication Year: 2013
Format: Hardcover
Language: English
Era: 2010s
Author: Kate Atkinson
Features: Dust Jacket, Film/TV Adaptation
Genre: Drama, Fantasy, Historical
Topic: Time Travel
Country/Region of Manufacture: Canada