Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life and A God in Ruins belong to the second category, which feels faintly absurd when you consider what they actually do, and how good they are.
They are ambitious without being ostentatious. They are emotionally devastating without resorting to easy manipulation. They play with form, time, memory, and narrative truth, and yet they remain rooted in the granular texture of lived life: a coat buttoned wrong, a sentence left hanging, a family story retold until it hardens into “fact”. They are books about war, but also about everything war touches: love, duty, cowardice, resentment, desire, the strange persistence of ordinary days.
And still, when I think about the books that get invoked constantly as touchstones, the ones that keep resurfacing in reading lists and online debates and cultural shorthand, these two don’t come up as often as they should.
I want to make a case that this isn’t a small oversight. It’s a symptom of how we talk about novels, and what we reward.
Two books, one obsession: what makes a life
Life After Life opens with an unsettling promise: Ursula Todd will be born, die, and be born again. She will live a life, then another, then another. The premise has the shape of a high-concept hook, the sort of thing you can summarise in a sentence and sell as a clever idea.
But Atkinson refuses to treat it as a trick. She begins with the newborn Ursula in a “darkness fell” kind of scene, where her “helpless little heart” stops, suddenly and shockingly, “like a bird dropped from the sky”. It is Atkinson in miniature: the precision of that simile, the way fragility and finality are fused in a few compressed images, and the faint uncanniness that makes death feel intimate rather than distant.
The repeated lives are not there to invite you to marvel at authorial gymnastics. They are there to make you feel the weight of contingency. To make you aware, again and again, of how much of a person’s fate is not fate at all, but a sequence of unremarkable moments that could tip either way. A door left open. A child not watched closely enough. A doctor who arrives too late. A stranger who becomes a husband, or doesn’t.
In less skilful hands, this kind of structure can turn human beings into pawns, a little abstract, a little expendable. In Atkinson’s hands, the opposite happens. Ursula becomes more solid with each iteration, not less. The repetition doesn’t make her life feel disposable. It makes it feel unbearably precious because you keep seeing how easily it can be taken.
Atkinson is also sly about what she repeats. She isn’t interested in replaying scenes as if the book is a film looping in a projector. She’s interested in the feeling of recognition, the uncanny click of “we’ve been here before,” and the way memory, intuition, and dread can exist in a person without a neat explanation. Ursula can look back and think, “it was a long time ago now. And it was yesterday”. That simple paradox catches what memory does to time, how trauma keeps the past in the present, how the mind refuses to file certain moments away. It’s typical of Atkinson’s gift for folding big ideas into sentences that sound almost conversational, as if she’s just happened to notice something true.
Which is to say: Life After Life is not really about time travel. It’s about the moral and emotional pressure of time. About what you carry, even when you don’t know you’re carrying it.
And then, just as you begin to feel you understand what Atkinson is doing, A God in Ruins comes along and unsettles the whole arrangement.
It is often described as a companion novel. That word “companion” is doing far too much work. It makes the book sound like an optional extra, an echo, a pleasant return to familiar territory. In reality, it is a reckoning. A second lens. A book that changes the emotional physics of the first one.
For me, it is better than Life After Life, which is saying something, but it is so good. Atkinson has also said that A God in Ruins is her best book.
It follows Teddy Todd, Ursula’s brother, and it is in some ways more traditional than Life After Life, at least on the surface. It moves through decades. It has the scaffolding of a life story. It centres the experience of war, especially the RAF bombing campaigns, and the afterlife of those years in one man’s body and mind.
Atkinson introduces Teddy with a kind of existential clarity that makes the air go thinner. He thinks of life as “a handful of heartbeats… a heartbeat followed by a heartbeat… a breath followed by a breath… and then there was a last moment”. The repetition is doing the work of breathing, the rhythm mimicking the thing it describes, until the observation becomes quietly musical and quietly unbearable. Life as accumulation. Life as pulse. Life as something you do, and then you don’t.
Why aren’t these books talked about enough?
This is not a claim that they are obscure. They have been widely read. They have been praised. The BBC made a TV series out of Life After Life. People who love Atkinson love them fiercely. The issue is the volume and the longevity of the conversation. These books don’t seem to occupy the cultural space they ought to.
I’ve been circling a few possible reasons.
They refuse to sit still in a single genre
A lot of readers, publishers, and online reading culture still like books to declare themselves. Historical fiction. Literary fiction. Speculative. War novel. Family saga. The comfort of a label is that it tells you how to read, and what sort of satisfaction to expect.
Atkinson sidesteps this. Life After Life looks like historical fiction, behaves like speculative fiction, and reads with the intimacy of domestic realism. A God in Ruins is a war novel, yes, but also a novel about marriage, fatherhood, disappointment, and the way a whole life can be misread by the people living closest to it. She is not interested in staying in a lane. She is interested in the mess, and the mess is where the truth is.
They are high concept without being flashy about it
Atkinson’s formal play is never separate from her emotional intent. The structure is not a party trick. It is a method for making you feel the fragility of life, and the cruelty of chance, and the strange persistence of love and fear across time.
When Ursula thinks, “in the end we all arrive at the same place” and yet for her “how you got there was the whole point”, it’s as if the entire novel briefly steps out of its own complexity and speaks plainly. It’s a line that crystallises the book’s conceit about fate and agency, and it’s also a gentle rebuke to the idea that all endings are equal just because they are endings. The route matters. The choices matter. The accidents matter. The versions matter.
WWII fiction is crowded, and often formulaic
There is a well-worn cultural script for the Second World War in fiction. Even novels that aim for darkness can fall into familiar beats, familiar comforts, familiar moral certainties.
Atkinson has no interest in flattering that script. Her war is morally complicated, psychologically damaging, and often terrifyingly banal. She shows how war deforms people and families, and how its consequences persist long after the bombs stop falling.
One of the ways A God in Ruins makes this visceral is through its attention to the natural world, especially birds. Teddy, as a boy, watches a skylark whose “quivering flight” and “transcendental thread of song” stir an unexpectedly deep emotion in him. It’s Atkinson’s descriptive finesse, yes, but it’s also a keyhole into Teddy’s interior life. Beauty arriving without permission. Transience made audible. The knowledge, even in childhood, that the world can be unbearably lovely and unbearably breakable.
Later, that image returns in a darker register, scaled up into counterfactual grief: “all the birds who were never born, all the songs that were never sung and so can only exist in the imagination”. It’s a haunting thought, and it lands with the force of everything the book is trying to do. War is not only death. It is absence. It is the unlived. It is the beauty that never gets the chance to happen.
The companion novel effect makes people treat the second as optional
Many readers stop at Life After Life. It’s a complete novel, rich and strange and emotionally resonant. But A God in Ruins is not simply “more”. It is a book that deepens and destabilises. It is, in a very real sense, a book that argues with its predecessor.
If Life After Life explores the wild contingency of a life, A God in Ruins asks what we do with the life we have, once the big events have passed, once survival has become ordinary, once the story is no longer a neat arc but a long, uneven series of days.
What these books actually offer
What they offer is not merely formal ingenuity. It’s a way of seeing.
They make contingency feel real
A lot of novels rely on the illusion that a life has an inherent shape. Even when characters suffer, the suffering is narratively purposeful. It leads somewhere. It reveals something. It becomes, in retrospect, meaningful.
Atkinson refuses this comfort. She gives you Ursula’s repeated lives not as a comforting fantasy of correction, but as a sustained confrontation with the fact that meaning is often something we build afterwards. The events themselves are not obliged to cohere.
That’s why Ursula’s “how you got there was the whole point” hits so hard. It isn’t simply a comment on the plot device. It’s the ethical heart of the book. If we all “arrive at the same place”, then everything that makes us human is in the getting there. The tenderness. The mistakes. The violence. The luck. The moments we never notice until they are gone.
They are obsessed with the ordinary, and that obsession is where the power lives
One of Atkinson’s great gifts is her attention to domestic detail. She is brilliant on rooms, food, clothes, small irritations, sibling dynamics, the awkward intimacy of family life. She understands that history happens in kitchens as much as it happens on battlefields.
This matters because war, in these books, is not a separate realm of heroism. It is an intrusion into the ordinary, a tearing of the domestic fabric. The repeated deaths in Life After Life aren’t melodrama. They are a reminder that life is held together by everyday threads, and those threads can snap without warning. Ursula’s “helpless little heart” stopping “like a bird dropped from the sky” is horrific because it’s so simple. A tiny body, a sudden silence, and a metaphor that makes you feel the drop.
They handle morality without sentimentality
Both books are morally intelligent in a way that feels increasingly rare. They don’t divide the world into admirable people and contemptible people. They show people being petty, loving, cruel, frightened, loyal, selfish, generous, and often all of those things in close succession.
They also refuse the tidy moral arc. People do not always learn. Trauma does not always produce enlightenment. War does not always make people noble. Sometimes it just makes them hurt, and sometimes the hurt curdles.
Atkinson doesn’t treat that as a failure of character. She treats it as part of being human, which is both more compassionate and more unsettling.
They offer a double vision of war
If you read only one WWII novel a year, you could do far worse than choosing one of these. But their real force emerges when you see them together.
Life After Life gives you war as a network, an atmosphere, an inevitability creeping across Europe and into one family. It shows how the war rearranges destinies, and how it can feel both unavoidable and absurd.
A God in Ruins gives you war as an internal landscape. It shows what it does to Teddy, and what Teddy does with the damage. It shows how war experiences are processed, misremembered, buried, and sometimes transformed into silence. It shows how a man can survive and yet remain partly trapped in the sky.
And then it gives you that line about the birds, the songs that were never sung. If war keeps happening inside people, it also keeps happening in the imagination, in the shape of what was prevented from existing at all. That’s a quieter kind of horror, and Atkinson makes it linger.
If you like these novels, you’ll probably like Atkinson’s duo
I’m wary of the “if you liked X, you’ll love Y” formula, because it can flatten books into a set of comparable features, as if novels are kitchen appliances. Still, sometimes it helps to locate a book by association, not because it’s identical, but because it scratches a similar itch.
If you like novels that play with time and structure, but still care about people:
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David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
For the sense of lives repeating and refracting, and a structure that isn’t decorative. -
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
For war, time fracture, dark comedy, and moral unease. -
Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler’s Wife
For time as an emotional problem, not a sci-fi trick.
If you like wartime fiction that refuses to be cosy:
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Pat Barker, Regeneration trilogy
For psychological precision and moral complexity. -
Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
For lyricism, intimacy, and ambiguity. -
Sebastian Faulks, Birdsong
For scale of feeling, though Atkinson’s tone is sharper, wryer, less overtly sweeping.
If you like novels that interrogate narrative truth and the stories we live inside:
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Ian McEwan, Atonement
For the ethical weight of storytelling and the consequences of making narratives tidy. -
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
For quiet devastation, self-deception, and the way a life can become legible too late. -
Ali Smith, How to be both
For formal playfulness that still delivers emotional depth.
These aren’t direct equivalents. Atkinson’s voice is distinct, full of dry wit and a kind of stealth compassion. But if you have a taste for novels where form and feeling are inseparable, you will find something here that feels both familiar and startling.
A final nudge, not a sales pitch
There are books I admire and books I return to, and then there are books that subtly recalibrate what I think a novel can do. Life After Life and A God in Ruins do that recalibrating work. They don’t offer easy catharsis. They offer something better: a deeper understanding of how lives are made, unmade, repeated, and remembered.
Teddy’s definition of life as “a handful of heartbeats” ends with “a last moment”. Ursula’s sense that “it was a long time ago now. And it was yesterday” insists that time isn’t obedient. Between them, Atkinson builds a world where endings are inevitable, but where the routes we take, the songs that survive, and the songs that never get the chance to exist, are what give life its shape.
If you’ve been meaning to read them “one day”, consider this the gentle insistence you needed. Read Life After Life, and then don’t stop. Read A God in Ruins as well. Let it argue with the first book. Let it complicate what you thought you knew. Let it stay with you.
And if you’ve already read them, I’d love to know where you landed. Did you see A God in Ruins as a companion, or as a correction? Did it change the first book for you, or did it deepen it? Or did it do something more unsettling, which is to make you realise how much we rely on stories to give shape to things that refuse to be shaped?
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