Kate Atkinson is a true original. Best known for her crime novels featuring the shambolic but charismatic detective Jackson Brodie, Atkinson has a Dickensian ability to create numerous quirky characters and plotlines that tangle and overlap in ways impossible to predict. Those Chinese puzzle plots keep you turning the pages, but it is the odd, yet entirely believable, characters that bring her world to life.
Atkinson’s first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year, was not a crime novel and neither is her latest, Life After Life (Little Brown Publishers).
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