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 […]
Now This is Literature or a Defense of Kindness
It’s been such a long time since I read Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life that I realized a few chapters in that I was slightly confusing certain aspects about the family with Kate Morton’s novel The Lake House. Mostly just birthing order and Teddy’s age – I thought he was the youngest and conceived after his father’s return from World War I when he was actually born in 1914 and not the last sibling. However, I definitely remembered that he was Ursula’s favorite sibling, his […]
Life After Life After Life After Life…
I kept picking up Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life every time I was in a book store for years. I’d seen the BBC adaptation of some of her Jackson Brodie stories at one point and for whatever reason felt like I needed to read those first. I don’t know why, as this novel is wholly separate from that detective series. In any case it showed up as a Kindle Deal of the Day a few months ago and I finally pulled the trigger. I’m so […]
When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.
I don’t want to tell you what this book does, as a piece of fiction, but I will tell you what it’s about. This is a kind of sequel, kind of companion piece to the other Kate Atkinson novel Life after Life, which I listened on a long hike. At first in that one it was frustrating to keep up with the premise, which involves the same character starting and restarting life as she keeps hitting the same fatal snags, and sort of nudging her choices […]