Life After Life

Travel Guide

England

England is evoked via several scenes and over the years from between 1910, when Ursula was born and 1967 when she dies for the final time

England was a dark and hard place to be durig the two World Wars and their after-effects. A major part of the novel is set in London during the air raids of the 1940s, and there are some very graphic and gory scenes here. Hard to read but realistic and evocative in a small way at least of the true horror of those dark days.

Berlin

There are equally vivid descriptions of air raids on Berlin, for Ursula also spent part of one of her lives in Nazi Germany. She visits in the 1930s before Hitler came to power and later in 1933. The changes to come are felt even then. There’s an interesting insight here when she lodges with a family whose daughter had been at Kindergarten with Eva Braun, Hitler’s mistress. You, as the reader also get to see and experience Berchtesgaden and observe Hitler…
The author says –

“I was born at the end of 1951 and grew up feeling that had I just missed the Second World War, that something terrible and tremendous had occurred and I would never know it. Looking back this strikes me as odd for as a child I was never aware of those around me talking about it. It was almost as though it had never happened, for although my family experienced the war they rarely mentioned it.