Is there an audiobook of Life After Life?

Yes. Life After Life has an Audible audiobook edition, narrated by Fenella Woolgar.

How long is the Life After Life audiobook?

The Life After Life audiobook runs 15 hr 26 min.

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson book cover for the Book of the Day historical fiction book review

Our score

4.0/ 5

Excellent

Listen to Life After Life free with an Audible trial Narrator, runtime & our audio review

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EDITION PUBLISHEDApril 2013

Genres

Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction

Themes

What if you could live one life repeatedlySecond chances taken over and over againRegret and the small decisions that redirect a lifeThe Blitz and what surviving it costsMeaning built from repetition rather than progress

Life After Life

Name: Life After Life
Price: 12.99 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Kate Atkinson

Kate Atkinson

Kate Atkinson's Life After Life hands Ursula Todd an unlimited supply of do-overs. Born in an English snowstorm in 1910, she dies and is born again and again, through the Spanish flu, a violent marriage, and the Blitz. A historical novel about regret, second chances, and what if getting a life right were even possible.

The Review

Our take

The first fifty pages of Life After Life are genuinely disorienting, and Atkinson knows exactly what she is doing to you. Ursula Todd is born in a snowstorm in 1910 and dies before her first breath, the cord around her neck. Two pages later she is born in the same snowstorm and lives. Then a beach, a wave, and she is gone again. The chapter headings keep returning to the same date the way a stuck record returns to the same bar, and for a while you read with a thumb in the previous section, checking. Then something clicks. The repetition stops registering as a device and starts registering as weather.

What Atkinson does with those restarts is why the book has lasted. Ursula never gets an explanation and never gets a rulebook. What she gets is a shiver of dread on one particular stair, a reluctance to open one particular door, and no idea why. The house at Fox Corner gathers weight across the versions, the same nursery, the same lawn, the same maid setting off for London on Armistice night, an errand that has already killed most of the family more than once. By the fifth pass, a scene you have read three times can flatten you, because you know what the room is holding and Ursula does not.

The Blitz chapters are the strongest writing in the novel and among the best I have read on that subject anywhere. Atkinson puts Ursula on a heavy rescue squad, pulling bodies out of collapsed terraces at four in the morning, and her prose goes flat and exact right when it has to. She is tender everywhere else in this book. Here she stops. The novel does sag, though. A run of chapters that follows Ursula to Germany and into Eva Braun's circle is the most argued-over stretch of the book, and the complaint holds up: the strand raises an enormous question and gets less room than it needs, inside 500-plus pages already carrying a great deal.

Why you should read

Big-canvas historical fiction spanning both world wars
Structural experiments that pay off emotionally
The Blitz written from street level
Books that reward rereading the first chapter last

What to expect

A disorienting first fifty pages, then it clicks
500-plus pages with a genuine mid-book sag
Repeated scenes that shift meaning on each pass
Dry English comedy running alongside a lot of death

The last chapter sends you back to the first, which is the correct instinct, and rereading that opening once you know what Atkinson has been assembling is a different experience altogether. This is a novel about an ordinary Englishwoman who never becomes famous, never gets told what she is for, and never receives a single word of confirmation that any of it counted. Atkinson treats that as a complete life rather than a wasted one. The snow keeps falling in 1910. The door keeps opening. Ursula keeps trying.

Reviewed by Avery · How our reviews are written

Our verdict

4.0/ 5

Excellent

Listen to Life After Life free with an Audible trial Narrator, runtime & our audio review

Buy on Amazon

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Prices may vary.

Where to read or listen

Is there an audiobook of Life After Life?: Yes. Life After Life has an Audible audiobook edition, narrated by Fenella Woolgar.
Listen to Life After Life free with an Audible trial
We earn from qualifying Amazon purchases.
How long is the Life After Life audiobook?: The Life After Life audiobook runs 15 hr 26 min.
How much does Life After Life cost?: On Amazon: Kindle $12.99, Paperback $11.87, Hardcover $14.87. Prices as of August 26, 2026 at 3:46 AM EDT and may change.

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Common questions

What is Life After Life about?: The first fifty pages of Life After Life are genuinely disorienting, and Atkinson knows exactly what she is doing to you. Ursula Todd is born in a snowstorm in 1910 and dies before her first breath, the cord around her neck. Two pages later she is born in the same snowstorm and lives. Then a…
Is Life After Life worth reading?: We scored Life After Life 4 out of 5. Kate Atkinson's Life After Life hands Ursula Todd an unlimited supply of do-overs. Born in an English snowstorm in 1910, she dies and is born again and again, through the Spanish flu, a violent marriage, and the Blitz. A historical novel about regret, second chances, and what…