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Welcome to the Slate Audio Book Club's discussion of life after life, Kate Atkinson's epic historical novel about a woman who relives the first half of the

20th century over and over trying to fix the mistakes that she and the world have made. I'm Dan Quois.

I'm the editor of the Slate Book Review,

and I'm here in Slate's DC Recording Studio. Joining us from our New Haven branch is Slate Senior Editor Emily Bazelon. Hi. Hey, Dan. And here in DC is our special guest this month, Slate Assistant Editor, Katie Waldman. Hi. Hi. Welcome, Katie. We're so happy to have a year with us.

So, as in all of our

audio book clubs, if you have not read Life After Life by Kate Atkinson, you should maybe wait to listen unless you

love being spoiled, because we will talk about the plot and the end of Life After Life, or in fact, the many,

many endings of life

after life because it has a lot of endings the life of ursula todd has a lot of endings also emily

and katie if i drop dead in the middle of this podcast recording we'll just start again from the

beginning and see if we can make it better the second time through yeah we should be able to do

that in the book it's no problem at all right it happens. So I would assume that the same thing would happen here. So, yes, that is the story of life after life. That's sort of the high concept gimmick of life after life is that Ursula Todd, this woman who we meet when she is born in 1910 keeps dying. She just keeps on dying for she dies during childbirth, and then she

comes back and we see childbirth again, and then she survives childbirth, but then she drowns

when she's five. Then she comes back again, and she makes it to five, and this time she doesn't

drown, but then she dies of the flu and so on and so on and so on. As the book goes on, and as

her deaths start to accumulate, Ursula starts to be able to see or at least feel the ways that she can avert the ways that she had died in previous incarnations of herself.

And she begins to change her own future and change her own life, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.

But of course, I am leaving out the way that

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