Budapest street life. Hungary, April 2018. I thought that I'd mark my return to this blog with a book review. Where better than to start with Kate Atkinson's Life after Life . So often, experimental fiction doesn’t quite work. Interesting ideas become irritating, constantly shifting patterns or characters get annoying, and little showy quirks become ostentatious, pretentious and boring in longer form. These are the risks that Kate Atkinson has taken in Life after Life . In constructing the novel in a series of repeated loops back in time (each loop triggered by the death of our heroine Ursula Todd), the author frees her creative hand in exploring a multitude of alternative possible lives that play out for a girl born into an upper-middle-class family in 1910’s Buckinghamshire. While this may have resulted in a neat little exercise in authorial flamboyance that soon becomes tiresome, I found it a riveting device and one that Atkinson utilises to great effect. The gradual in