Life After Life – Cannonball Read 17

“No point in thinking, you just have to get on with life. We only have one after all, we should try and do our best. We can never get it right, but we must try.”

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

December 29, 2022 by narfna Leave a Comment

I will admit that I have been avoiding this book since it was published, but especially after I read a Sherlock fanfic one time* that was a riff on Life After Life, and which is one of the most emotionally traumatizing fics I’ve ever read, so by association I was pre-traumatized by this book. Also, one time I read the first Jackson Brodie mystery and I thought it was boring, so I thought this would be boring too. Happily, wrong on all fronts! *If you […]

The black bat night approached and enfolded her in its wings

July 11, 2018 by Dusty Highway 4 Comments

For the past 15+ years, I’ve been the target audience for the Man Booker awards: literary fiction snob leaning to British Commonwealth authors. Though I have been branching out into other genres over the last few years, I still look to the Booker long- and shortlists for recommendations and usually pick up at least a few each year. For some reason, I haven’t looked much into other prizes until this year when I realized the Baileys (formerly Orange) prize lists would be a great resource […]

If you want to understand deja vu better, this might help…

April 11, 2017 by genericwhitegirl Leave a Comment

“Mom, after someone dies and becomes a ghost, do they become a kid again?” My four-year-old asked me this just a day after I finished reading Atkinson’s book, Life After Life. “Well, some people believe that. It’s called reincarnation.” I told him, wondering if his earlier comment about how I should wear a certain necklace “the next time I got married” was related to this conversation. While I’m not sure Life After Life is about reincarnation, parallel universes, or a hybrid of both, it nonetheless […]

Reincarnation meets Groundhog Day….

January 3, 2017 by kella 3 Comments

Not my ideal choice for a first pick, but it was a book club selection that I was supposed to have read back in Nov/Dec, and I’m nothing if not an extraordinary procrastinator. I persevered through this with the gusto of someone who is determined to stick with a New Years Resolution. If I picked this up in October, I couldn’t guarantee the same enthusiasm. Life After Life was one of those books that I finished and said, “I think I liked it? Maybe? I […]

“Sometimes it was harder to change the past than it was the future.”

October 3, 2014 by faintingviolet Leave a Comment

Life After Life has been on my radar for over a year. It sounded intriguing – what would happen if you lived your life over and over again, and how would minute changes in your choices and actions affect that life? I was intrigued, but not drawn in. My mom read it with her book club late last year and her reaction to the work was “it was different. Not bad, but definitely different.” With that less than stellar review I pushed it further down […]

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Emmalita on “Only you, Em, would refer to heartbreak as a distraction. I think I would have a more sympathetic response if I asked to marry a bookcase.”Oh my goodness, Gallifrey was beautiful. I’m sure her mittens were gloriously murdery.

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