This wilful disruption of chronology allows Atkinson to reveal her characters in glimpses over the course of the novel while withholding vital information that creates mysteries at the heart of the story. It was as true for them as it was for the whole of poor, ruined Europe.” At first glance it appears to be a more straightforward novel than Life After Life, though it shares the same composition, flitting back and forth in time so that a chapter from Teddy’s childhood in 1925 sits alongside a fragment of his grandchildren’s childhood in the 1980s, before jumping back to 1947, when Teddy and his wife Nancy, newly married, are trying to come to terms with the aftermath of the devastation: “The war had been a great chasm and there could be no going back to the other side, to the people they were before.

One of those characters was Ursula’s much-loved younger brother Teddy who, in the final narrative, survives to become a bomber pilot in the second world war, is reported missing, presumed dead during a raid in ’43, but is given a reprieve by the author at the 11th hour, when he reappears at the end of the war having spent two years as a POW in Germany.Ī God in Ruins is the story of Teddy’s war and its legacy, “a ‘companion’ piece rather than a sequel”, according to the author.

A god in ruins novel