Life After Life

Deja vu!

I felt like I've read this book before.

Life After Life is about someone who keeps being reborn into the same life. Each time a detail or two changes, and then 'darkness falls' until the start of the next chapter.

In fact, my BPYC book club read it a couple of years ago.

This time it was a Book Babes selection, with discussion around whether Ursula's ability to relive her life was a gift or curse, and talk about whether there were things (big or small) we would do differently if we had our lives to live over again.

Our heroine Ursula isn't fully conscious she is revisiting her life, but has a vague sense of foreboding and sometimes a compulsion or impulse that she acts on that changes the course of events. Small things, like choosing to walk on the other side of the street one day, or bigger choices, like pushing someone down a flight of stairs, or  plotting someone's murder. The book has such a fascinating premise.

Inevitably, metaphysics creeps in. We travel and return to the psychiatrist’s office where Ursula’s parents take her, at age 10, for sessions in which the conversation touches on reincarnation and the nature of time. When Dr. Kellet suggests that the moody, spacey Ursula may be remembering other lives and asks her to draw something, she produces a snake with its tail in its mouth. “It’s a symbol representing the circularity of the universe,” the doctor explains. “Time is a construct, in reality everything flows, no past or present, only the now.” New York Times