The second novel about a Bomber Command pilot I’ve read in the space of as many months and both A God in Ruins and The Way Back to Florence have turned out to be fabulous enthralling if very different novels. The pilot is in this novel is Teddy, brother of Ursula in Life After Life. The novel spans his long life and offsets and hones it with the lives of his daughter and his two grandchildren. As ever with Atkinson there are layers of artifice in this novel – on one level, her novels are general...

This is another case where I took a chance to read an author's book having not been a fan of a previous book.If you read my review of "Life After Life", you'll see, I wasn't 'ga-ga' over that book!!! I didn't 'jump' for joy when this first book came out either. PASS were my first thoughts!Overtime ... I heard and read a few things about this 'companion' novel to have me re-consider ...( enough to enter a Goodreads give-a-way). No, I didn't win...but my local thrift box had a 'like new' copy for ...

“A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we wake from dreams.“ – Ralph Waldo Emerson – Nature Thus opens Kate Atkinson’s companion work to her much acclaimed Life After Life. While the earlier work focused on The Blitz, Germany’s prolonged bombing of London and other English cities during World War II, this one looks at the Allied bombing campaign against Germany, first against strategic resources and later targeting c...

In Kate Atkinson’s time-bending novel, Life After Life, the author toyed with time and created several different timelines and narratives for her main character, Ursula Todd. Now, in this companion piece, the focus is on Teddy, Ursula’s brother, and his life as an RAF Halifax pilot and under-the-radar hero.Atkinson holds the magical power to shape time to fit her story and this one moves seamlessly from Teddy’s last treacherous flights (fewer than half of RAF pilots actually survived World War I...

What larks A tale of flight. Teddy is a bird-lover, and the story is full of birds and of flying and fleeing. His long life is marked by war: born in 1914, he becomes a bomber pilot in WW2. “He had been reconciled to death during the war and then suddenly it was over… Part of him never adjusted to having a future.”Teddy’s life story is told non-chronologically, in chapters labelled with the years. There’s occasional foreshadowing and rather more looking back, but it’s never confusing. Early on, ...

I hope this doesn’t sound conceited, but you might crow, too, if you had just written one BILLION reviews. I have the magic of combinatorics to thank. There are nine different fill-in-the-blank sections in this review that allow ten separate candidates each which in the end will embody the text. That makes 10 to the 9th power (1,000,000,000) possible outcomes. If you want your own individualized version, take the digits of your Social Security Number or any other 9-digit sequence of your choosin...

Perhaps the element of this novel that most moved me was the arrogant dismissive way the young often view older generations, especially children with regards to their parents. This is highlighted in the relationship between the obnoxiously brilliant Viola and her father Teddy. Teddy is/was a Bomber Command pilot during WW2. Almost nightly he goes through the harrowing experience of flying over Nazi Germany; the repressed guilt of dropping bombs on “innocent” civilians; the awareness that his dea...

I just cannot deal with Viola. Just no.

man, this book. chills, i tell you, everywhere chills. this is a companion book to Life After Life, and technically, it is "teddy's story." teddy, you will recall from life, is ursula's little brother. if you have not read Life After Life - what the crap is wrong with you?? go!! read!! meet us back here when you're done!i say "technically," because although teddy is definitely the center of this book, we are still treated to the stories and perspectives of some of our other friends from life, as...

I guess I just loved everything about this book except the cover but I won't knock any stars off for that. Kate Atkinson writes like a dream. The early parts of this book are slow but the prose is so good the slowness does not matter. And it needs to be read carefully anyway because at times the story flits backwards and forwards and the reader needs to be alert in order to keep track. I enjoyed the fact that the book is set in the same world as Life After Life but focuses on Teddy instead of Ur...