Read by Fenella Woolgar

“You can step in the same river but the water will always be new.”

TRIGGER WARNING: INFANT DEATH, MAIMING, RAPE, ABORTION.

What if you could live again and again, until you got it right?

On a cold and snowy night in 1910, Ursula Todd is born to an English banker and his wife. She dies before she can draw her first breath.

On that same cold and snowy night, Ursula Todd is born, lets out a lusty wail, and embarks upon a life that will be, to say the least, unusual. For as she grows, she also dies, repeatedly, in a variety of ways, while the young century marches on towards its second cataclysmic world war.

Does Ursula’s apparently infinite number of lives give her the power to save the world from its inevitable destiny? And if she can — will she?

I had this book recommended to me by a friend and oh my GOD what a thrill ride it was. It’s like The Day after Tomorrow but set during the start of the 20th century, and it features a woman going from one incarnation to the next.

The backdrop is set in the countryside of England from 1910 ’till 1926 and then it moves either to Germany to witness the rise of Hitler or to London to witness the bombing and the death during the Second World War.

I must say a massive thank you to Kate Atkinson for writing this book in such a beautiful way and including all the horrible ways a child could die – from birth to being suffocated by a pet, falling down a window, drowning in the sea or being killed by a transient after being sexually abused. Rape and violence find their way through this book as a single event can shape a girl’s entire future.

The book was adapted with some success into a British TV mini-series but I must say it failed to depict the true horrors of WW2 and the days as a rescue hand and also didn’t dwell at all on the incarnation where she joins the Hitler Youth and falls in love with a German and makes a life in Germany as it marches into war. Or the incarnation where she kills Hitler.

What the book is really about is family, love, the hardships of being a woman at the start of the century where your only options were – get married and have children straight out of boarding school or be a secretary and get married and have children.

Sylvie, Ursula’s mother, puts it quite boldly – why do you even want to have an education when all you will do is get married? Izzie is the only feminist exception to this rule – she makes a living in journalism and reaches fame when she writes “The adventures of little Augustus” based on the stories that Teddy told her during one summer. She is mostly consistent through the re-incarnations, the fun aunt, the one that knows an abortion clinic, the one that goes off to America to live a lavish life.

“A ‘career woman,’” Sylvie said, as if the two words had no place in the same sentence. “A spinster,” she added, contemplating the word. Ursula wondered why her mother was working so hard to rile her. “Perhaps you will never marry,” Sylvie said, as if in conclusion, as if Ursula’s life was as good as over. “Would that be such a bad thing? ‘The unmarried daughter,’” Ursula said, tucking into an iced fancy. “It was good enough for Jane Austen.”

Sylvie varies slightly – she’s always tough on Ursula, maybe because she’s a girl and maybe because she had more opportunities than she had when she was her age. Married young to a banker, Sylvie didn’t have any choice but to birth child after child and take care of the household. It’s only during the second world war she comes to her own by raising chicken and having a good trade system going on with the local villagers. Her marriage to Hugh is either loving and understanding or fraught with suspicion of adultery.

“Why is everything an ‘adventure’ with you?” Sylvie said irritably to Izzie.”

“Because life is an adventure, of course.”

“I would say it was more of an endurance race,” Sylvie said. “Or an obstacle course.”

What she does best is care for her children and in that, she excels as a mother.

So here are the deaths (as I remember them) and the lives of Ursula:

• death by cord around her neck during birth
• death by a cat sitting on her and suffocating
• death by drowning at 5 in the sea
• near death by her brother piling leaves in her cot and nearly suffocating her
• many deaths by the Influenza at 8 as her house maid goes to London and brings back the deadly virus which either kills her, kills her and Teddy, kills Pamela, Teddy and her. The only way to stop this cycle was to push Beatrice down the stairs to ensure she didn’t go to London at all.
• death at the hands of an abusive husband who bashes her head in with an ashtray after accusing her of cheating. This was probably the saddest story for me as she does live until adulthood but in her teens she is raped by a house guest and then gets pregnant, has an abortion and becomes a closet alcoholic. It’s only when this dude marries her that she starts having a life again, which unfortunately triggers his shitty behaviour. “Sometimes,’ Sylvie said, ‘one can mistake gratitude for love.”
• many deaths during the London bombings – either as a victim or as a rescue worker
• death by freezing after the end of the war
• death by old age by the sea
• death in Berlin by suicide – the only voluntary death she’s ever had – where she and her daughter take cyanide pills in the last few days before the end of the war, when the Russian’s arrival was imminent and the stories about their rapes and killings preceded them. I think this is the only story where she also had a kid and she was a mother.
• death by bullet when she pulled a gun on Hitler before he rose to power.

What the book teaches you is even if you do something different to avoid a death, death still comes for you in new and innovative ways. And the bonds you form through your life with others is what remains in the end. A summer day in the field, playing with your siblings, listening to your father tell a story, you never really know when the last time you see a person is.

And you can only choose to do the next right thing to live longer. But what if not longevity is the answer to stopping re-incarnation? What if what you do with the time you are given is the important part? Saving lives. One, two, three, millions?

“What if we had a chance to do it again and again, until we finally did get it right? Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”

What if nothing really matters?

“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.”

“What if this present were the world’s last night’ she said. ‘The word present makes all the difference, don’t you think? It makes it seem as if one’s somehow in the thick of it, which we are, rather than simply contemplating a theoretical concept.”