Life After Life Audiobook by Kate Atkinson— narrated by Fenella Woolgar

Why the audiobook wins

Fenella Woolgar reads Life After Life, and the casting solves the novel's hardest problem. Atkinson restarts Ursula Todd's life over and over, returning to the same 1910 snowstorm and the same house at Fox Corner, and on the page that structure disorients most readers for the first fifty pages. Woolgar handles each repeat with a small shift in weight rather than a reset, so you hear which version of a scene you are standing in before the words tell you.

Fifteen hours is a real commitment, and the Blitz chapters are where it pays off. Woolgar reads the rescue-squad passages flat and fast, with no performance in them at all, which is the only way that material should be handled. The English drawing-room comedy earlier in the book gets a far lighter touch, and she crosses between the two without ever sounding like she is changing gear.

If the non-linear structure is what has kept you away from this novel, the audio is the version to try. A narrator holding the through-line is a considerable help in a book that keeps starting over, and one credit buys all fifteen hours of it.