Often she is troubled by a place or a meeting which we know was a key event in one of her previous lives. She remembers the names of people that she has yet to meet or events that have yet to happen. Initially, she does not seem to have memories of her past lives but then, as she lives longer, she does. Sometimes she avoids death by a fortuitous set of circumstances, sometimes by a more sensible choice, sometimes someone else dies instead of her. Sometimes the gap is very small between the ages at which she dies indeed, she dies more or less at the same time more than once on two separate occasions, though gets to her death in different ways. This keeps on happening but, unlike Jeff Winston, each time she lives a different length of time, sometimes dying earlier, sometimes later. She is immediately born again and lives a bit longer but dies again while quite young and is immediately reborn again. Her heroine, Ursula Todd, is born but immediately dies, strangled by the umbilical cord. Kate Atkinson takes a somewhat different approach to these two ideas. Another work on this theme is the very famous film Groundhog Day, where the Bill Murray character wakes up on the same day – Groundhog Day – every day till… This continues to occur but each time he comes back a bit later and each time different things happen to him. He makes a lot of money, hires armies of doctors to monitor him when he reaches forty-three and then dies of a heart attack again, again coming back but a bit later this time. As a sport journalist, he now knows all the future results of major sports events as well as what stocks to buy. In this novel, a forty-three year old sports journalist, Jeff Winston, dies of a heart attack and immediately is back when he was eighteen, just as he was then, with the only difference being that he can remember everything that had happened in his previous life. Like many readers of “serious” fiction, I have a few less serious works which I very much enjoy. Home » England » Kate Atkinson » Life After Life Kate Atkinson: Life After Life
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