Life After Life follows Ursula Todd, born in a snowstorm in England in 1910, who dies before she takes her first breath — and is then born again, and again, living different versions of her life across the turbulent first half of the twentieth century. Her many lives weave through the two World Wars, the London Blitz, and the intimate textures of an English country family, each iteration shaped by the smallest chance moments.

Ursula Todd is not a traditional protagonist — she is a presence, an accumulating life that learns (without knowing it) from each of her deaths. Teddy, in the companion novel, is her counterpart: a man who fully expected to die in the war and must figure out what it means to have a future he never planned for.

The two-book series — Life After Life and its companion A God in Ruins — together trace the Todd family across the twentieth century: first through Ursula's infinite lives, then through her beloved younger brother Teddy's singular, war-marked life as an RAF bomber pilot. Together they form one of literary fiction's most acclaimed explorations of time, chance, and what it means to have survived.