One title from her list of the fifty best contemporary novels over 500 pages:Kate Atkinson, Life After Life (704 pages)Read about another entry on the list.
You’d expect that having to live through multiple versions of the same woman’s life—only in (almost) each, she evades death and lives a bit longer—would get a little boring, but it’s actually fascinating, even gripping, especially when she figures out what’s going on and sets off to kill Hitler. Maybe not the best novel to read in 2020, though, considering how many tries it takes her to avoid dying from the Spanish flu.
Life After Life is among Miriam Parker indisputably best dogs in (contemporary) literature, Liese O'Halloran Schwarz's top ten books about self-reinvention, Caitlin Kleinschmidt tagged twelve moving novels of the Second World War, Jenny Shank's top five innovative novels that mess with chronology, Dell Villa's top twelve books from 2013 to give your mom, and Judith Mackrell's five best young fictional heroines in coming-of-age novels.
--Marshal Zeringue
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