Life After Life by Kate Atkinson book review

Life After Life is a book I picked up after I asked my social media channels what book they’d recommend as a book that made them stop and think about life after finishing it. Also, my parents are big fans of Atkinson’s writing and her other books and so I thought what more encouragement do I need to pick this up than those two factors?


This article contains affiliate links. This means if you choose to purchase any products via the links below, I may receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. These affiliate links do not affect my final opinion of the product.

Life After Life follows Ursula Todd, who is born in 1910 and repeatedly dies and is reborn, reliving multiple versions of her life through the 20th century. She begins to understand what is happening to her and there are attempts to alter the way she lives her lives to change the outcomes. I’ll be honest, though, I didn’t really care all that much about a lot of what happened.

Life After Life plot – 3.75/5

As mentioned above, the premise for Life after Life really interested me – the combination of the concept and people’s comments on social that it’s a book that made them think about their own lives had me thinking I was really going to enjoy this. However, the book tells a set of relatively uninteresting stories about Ursula where along the way she has these odd flashback moments of certain things having happened before.

In fact, there were moments in the book where I thought I was rereading the same lines again until I realised some minor changes to the outcome. It just all underwhelmed me quite a lot.

There were some saving graces – a couple of the plot points that Ursula finds herself a part of were quite interesting and did gauge my interest once again. But in general, it just wasn’t a book that had enough moments that kept me intrigued.

I do have to give props to Atkinson’s writing, though. Despite not being a plot I found particularly engaging, I can certainly recognise someone with a talent for the english language.

Life After Life characters – 3.75/5

Additionally, the characters in Life After Life just didn’t grab me either. Our protagonist Ursula is fine but at no point did she ever do or say anything that made me then want to vouch for her.

My favourite types of characters are ones who are so engaging and interesting I want them to succeed or those who go through a big change or emotional journey and yes some of these may slightly apply to Ursula but just not enough for me to care.

The supporting cast around Ursula weren’t impactfule enough on me either unfortauntely. There were a few noteable family members whose presence then did pique my interest a little whenever their names were mentioned, but again not enough for me to really care.

Life After Life final rating – 3.75/5

Life After Life is a book I really thought I was going to like. It came with a lot of hype from social media, Atkinson is one of my parents’ favourite authors and the concept behind the story sounded like something I’d be interested in – but unfotunately it just never reached its potential. The plot jumped around too much for me and the none of the characters were engaging enough for me to stay focused on their journey. There may be something I’m missing about Life After Life as it just wasn’t quite the book some others had hyped it up to be to me.

Pick up a copy of Life After Life

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *