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. In my last post I wrote about how The Luminaries had taken me sooo long to read. Life after Life is another lengthy boo
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It is 1866, and Walter Moody has come to make his fortune upon the New Zealand goldfields. On arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of twelve local men, who have met in secret to discuss a series of unsolved crimes. A wealthy man has vanished, a whore has tried to end her life, and an enormous fortune has been discovered in the home of a luckless drunk. Moody is soon drawn into the mystery: a network of fates and fortunes that is as complex and exquisitely patterned as the night sky. The Luminaries is an extraordinary piece of fiction. It is full of narrative, linguistic and psychological pleasures, and has a fiendishly clever and original structuring device. Written in pitch-perfect historical register, richly evoking a mid-19th century world of shipping and banking and goldrush boom and bust, it is also a ghost story, and a gripping mystery. It is a thrilling achievement and will confirm for critics and readers that Catton is one of the brightest stars in the international
When I finished this amazing book after a few minutes I just began to sob, as the complexities of what I had just finished reading all sank in. I’m not going to outline the plot because the book blurb does that but just to say that two stories one set in 1940’s and one in 2012 seem so unconnected at first, then there are tenuous links and then they rush together at the end, with the full impact of them combining and hitting you. To read the book is almost effortless, it’s like a story being told to you by an old friend. It has an almost autobiographical feel to it, like the author really lived and saw these scenes he describes. The writing is captivating, even though at times the storyline is gruesome and too vivid and gory to want to read, you do read it because it draws you in. I found myself thinking about the book when I wasn’t reading it. I couldn’t put this book down and read it over 4 days whilst travelling to and from work – which is my usual reading time, but then in th