Todd Family Books in Order

The Todd family novels take Kate Atkinson’s long‑running interest in chance and consequence and push it into overtly speculative territory. Together Life After Life and A God in Ruins trace one English family through the upheavals of the twentieth century, circling especially around siblings Ursula and Teddy Todd.

In Life After Life, Ursula is born in 1910 to a comfortable but not grand family living at Fox Corner, a house in the countryside outside London. She dies almost immediately when the umbilical cord wraps around her neck – and then she is born again. Each time Ursula’s life restarts, small differences in timing and choice send her down new paths, from childhood accidents and the 1918 influenza pandemic to the London Blitz and, in one strand, marriage to a German lawyer in Berlin.

The novel returns again and again to the same key moments, letting Ursula’s growing sense of déjà vu nudge her toward different decisions. Sometimes this only saves one person, or shifts a private sorrow; sometimes it alters the course of her own life entirely. The Todd household, with its mix of siblings, parents and visiting relatives, becomes a fixed point that the narrative orbits as history crashes over it.

A God in Ruins steps sideways rather than straight ahead. It follows Teddy Todd, Ursula’s younger brother, whose golden childhood gives way to the brutal work of flying Halifax bombers over Nazi Germany. The story moves back and forth across Teddy’s life – his war years, his marriage to childhood friend Nancy, his strained relationship with their daughter Viola, and his later role as a hands‑on grandfather.

Where Ursula’s story offers repeated do‑overs, Teddy’s appears more linear and unforgiving. The book is preoccupied with what it costs to survive when so many comrades did not, and with the smaller, quieter wounds that family members inflict on each other without meaning to. It also mirrors and reframes some scenes from Life After Life, rewarding readers who know both books.

Taken together, the Todd novels are less about time‑travel tricks than about how lives are shaped by war, accident and character. They combine close, often funny domestic scenes with stark depictions of bombing raids and loss. Readers who enjoy family sagas, historical fiction and experiments with narrative structure will find a lot to explore in this two‑book sequence.