Category: General
New Lebanon Book Group: "A God in Ruins" by Kate Atkinson
April 2, 2017
You may remember we read Atkinson's earlier book "Life After Life" a few years ago. This standalone companion to that book continues with a couple of the characters, including Ursula and her beloved brother Teddy....
It’s about Paradise lost and fiction’s ways of allowing us to imagine what we cannot know. This elaborate multigenerational family story is filled with ascents and descents, growing up and growing old, kindness and cruelty. It’s also a tale of an uncommonly good man who has willed himself to be one. - Janet Maslin, NY Times, April 30, 2015
This is a novel about war and the shadow it casts even over generations who have never known it, but it is also a novel about fiction. Though it may appear to lack the bold formal conceit that made Life After Life so original, don’t make the mistake of thinking that Atkinson has abandoned her interest in authorial playfulness...A God in Ruins, together with its predecessor, is Atkinson’s finest work, and confirmation that her genre-defying writing continues to surprise and dazzle - Stephanie Merritt, The Guardian, May 10, 2015
