Kate Atkinson wins Costa novel prize for A God in Ruins

Described as ‘utterly magnificent’ by the judges, Atkinson’s award makes her the first author to receive the Costa novel prize three times: for a God in Ruins in 2016, Life After Life in 2013 and Behind the Scenes at the Museum in 1995

Alison Flood

Monday 4 January 2016 19.30 GMT

The pressure might have been too much for some writers but not Kate Atkinson: just two years after winning the Costa novel award for Life After Life, a major bestseller hailed as “astonishing” by judges at the time, the novelist has landed the prize again for her follow-up, A God in Ruins.

Described as a “utterly magnificent and in a class of its own. A genius book” by the judges, A God in Ruins tells the story of the second world war bomber pilot Teddy Todd, brother of Ursula, the many versions of whose life and death were recounted by Atkinson in Life After Life.

Kate Atkinson / Life After Life / Review by Alex Clark

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson – review

Themes of fate, family life and renewal are brilliantly explored in this story of a life lived in wartime Britain

Alex Clark
Wednesday 6 March 2013 10.54 GMT

K

ate Atkinson's new novel is a marvel, a great big confidence trick – but one that invites the reader to take part in the deception. In fact, it is impossible to ignore it. Every time you attempt to lose yourself in the story of Ursula Todd, a child born in affluent and comparatively happy circumstances on 11 February 1910, it simply stops. If this sounds like the quick route to a short book, don't worry: the narrative starts again – and again and again – but each time it takes a different course, its details sometimes radically, sometimes marginally altered, its outcome utterly unpredictable. Atkinson's general rule is that things seem to get better with repetition, but this, her self-undermining novel seems to warn us, is a comfort that is by no means guaranteed, either.

Kate Atkinson / Behind the Scenes at the Museum / Review

Kate Atkinson

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE MUSEUM

Guardian book club: A slew of deaths

John Mullan on Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson 

Week one: deaths

John Mullan
Saturday 18 October 2008

It is hardly surprising that Ruby Lennox, the narrator of Kate Atkinson's Behind the Scenes at the Museum, should, aged 17, fantasise about her own funeral - the open coffin strewn with flowers, a church filled not just with friends and family but also "an admiring Leonard Cohen and a soulful Terence Stamp", and with Maria Callas singing. (It is 1968.) For the novel, which is her story of her family, has more deaths than even Dickens would have dared include. "As a family, we are genetically disposed towards having accidents."