Kate Atkinson's latest novel deserves to be read several times. It is a sprawling work set in England and Germany from 1910 to some time after the Second World War, telling and retelling the different possible lives and deaths of Ursula Todd. There's a mild supernatural element to the story, with Ursula sometimes dimly aware of her past lives, and motivated to act differently to avoid the many pointless deaths she could have encountered. But it is not all about her own learning, since some of the different lives rely on randomly different sets of events and accidents. This highlights the contingency of our lives, and how easily everything could have been very different. So this is a novel of high concepts, and it carries this all the way through. It follows Ursula's life through two world wars, and shows the terrible cost of the bombing of London. Death haunts the whole book, looming over Ursula at all times. We also see her vulnerability in the position of a woman, with men being violent and forcing themselves on her, until in later lives she learns to assert herself more. So it is about the major themes of the twentieth century - war, love, marriage, power, and class. In nearly all her lives, Ursula is deeply versed in English and other literature, and she often makes reference to quotations. Yet despite having many of the marks of erudite literature, it is also a set of powerful and compelling stories that leave the reader not only wondering what happens, but what else might have happened. Fenella Woolgar performs the unabridged audiobook with appropriate emotional range, giving all the death scenes enough resonance without making them sentimental.