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A God in Ruins

(Todd Family #2)

Kate Atkinson

3.94 · Rating details · 46,666 ratings · 6,167 reviews

In Life After Life Ursula Todd lived through the turbulent events of the last century again and again. In A God in Ruins, Atkinson turns her focus on Ursula’s beloved younger brother Teddy – would-be poet, RAF bomber pilot, husband and father – as he navigates the perils and progress of the 20th century. For all Teddy endures in battle, his greatest challenge will be to fa ...more

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Hardcover, 468 pages

Published May 5th 2015 by Little, Brown and Company (first published May 1st 2015)

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Jan 30, 2015 karen rated it really liked it

Shelves: from-publisher-or-author

man, this book. chills, i tell you, everywhere chills. this is a companion book to Life After Life, and technically, it is "teddy's story." teddy, you will recall from life, is ursula's little brother. if you have not read Life After Life - what the crap is wrong with you?? go!! read!! meet us back here when you're done!

i say "technically," because although teddy is definitely the center of this book, we are still treated to the stories and perspectives of some of our other friends from life, as ...more

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Jun 04, 2015 Will Byrnes rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fiction, historical-fiction, mystery-and-spy-fiction, books-of-the-year-2015

“A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we wake from dreams.“ – Ralph Waldo Emerson – Nature

Thus opens Kate Atkinson’s companion work to her much acclaimed Life After Life. While the earlier work focused on The Blitz, Germany’s prolonged bombing of London and other English cities during World War II, this one looks at the Allied bombing campaign against Germany, first against strategic resources and later targeting c ...more

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Sep 03, 2015 Violet wells rated it really liked it

Shelves: world-war-two, contemporary-british-fiction, 21st-century, historical-fiction

The second novel about a Bomber Command pilot I’ve read in the space of as many months and both A God in Ruins and The Way Back to Florence have turned out to be fabulous enthralling if very different novels. The pilot is in this novel is Teddy, brother of Ursula in Life After Life. The novel spans his long life and offsets and hones it with the lives of his daughter and his two grandchildren.

As ever with Atkinson there are layers of artifice in this novel – on one level, her novels are general The second novel about a Bomber Command pilot I’ve read in the space of as many months and both A God in Ruins and The Way Back to Florence have turned out to be fabulous enthralling if very different novels. The pilot is in this novel is Teddy, brother of Ursula in Life After Life. The novel spans his long life and offsets and hones it with the lives of his daughter and his two grandchildren.

As ever with Atkinson there are layers of artifice in this novel – on one level, her novels are generally about fiction itself - but unlike Life after Life whose tricks I found gimmicky the artifice here is subtle and as such has greater artistry. Once again we have a family saga spanning four generations with a central figurehead acting as a kind of cypher through which the history is decrypted. And once again Atkinson’s brilliant command of structure is in evidence. She deftly shifts the narrative from one decade to another and back again without sacrificing the dramatic tension.

A God in Ruins exudes a similar nostalgia for the pre-war past as Brideshead Revisited. Atkinson clearly feels a great deal of affection for the old world modesty and self-effacement of Teddy – brilliantly offset by the bullying egotism and blinkered narcissism of his gloriously obnoxious daughter Viola (one of the best literary villains of past few years!). The war is depicted as a time of simple and stolen pleasures, of camaraderie and even excitement (Atkinson gives her characters very glamorous wartime occupations: Teddy’s wife Nancy is a codebreaker at Bletchley Park, a sister is an ATA pilot and a friend a female SOE agent); post-war, all the way to today, is depicted as a muddle of self-indulgence and misguided pursuits of utopia. Fox’s Wood, Teddy’s childhood home, is the utopia of the novel – everything eventually seems to lead back there as if all that followed, most obviously the war, was a fatal cosmic error in navigation. “The war had been a great chasm and there could be no going back to the other side, to the people they were before.”

Atkinson has a habit of being very hard on her female characters, especially on her mothers. Rarely do they like their children, let alone love them. Viola is her most monstrous mother to date. And as such provides most of the book’s best humour. At times we’re left asking ourselves if the sacrifice of all those young men was worth it if it spawned monsters like Viola. She also pokes fun at many contemporary pursuits (care homes, marketing jargon, courses in self-discovery, dietary fads) and includes some self-satire when Viola becomes a successful novelist.

Right, I’m on the Eurostar to Paris and we’re about to enter the tunnel so I’ve leave it at that… ...more

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Feb 10, 2015 Jill rated it it was amazing

In Kate Atkinson’s time-bending novel, Life After Life, the author toyed with time and created several different timelines and narratives for her main character, Ursula Todd. Now, in this companion piece, the focus is on Teddy, Ursula’s brother, and his life as an RAF Halifax pilot and under-the-radar hero.

Atkinson holds the magical power to shape time to fit her story and this one moves seamlessly from Teddy’s last treacherous flights (fewer than half of RAF pilots actually survived World War I In Kate Atkinson’s time-bending novel, Life After Life, the author toyed with time and created several different timelines and narratives for her main character, Ursula Todd. Now, in this companion piece, the focus is on Teddy, Ursula’s brother, and his life as an RAF Halifax pilot and under-the-radar hero.

Atkinson holds the magical power to shape time to fit her story and this one moves seamlessly from Teddy’s last treacherous flights (fewer than half of RAF pilots actually survived World War II) to the 20th and 21st century, where Teddy is a husband, father, and grandfather. We get to meet his daughter Viola, who blames him for her mother’s premature departure and makes a mess out of her own life…and subsequently, the lives of her two children.

But the key to this story lies in his title, which comes from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.” Wartime is, the author argues, man’s greatest fall from grace and so she walks a fine tightrope: revealing the amazing heroism and self-sacrifice of the men such as Teddy and his crew yet showcasing how (in her own words) “whether our war on savagery did not, in the end, become itself savage as we attacked the very people – the old, the young, women – that civilization is supposed to defend.” When Ursula asks Teddy, “and how do you define ‘innocence” anyway?”, attention must be paid.

The postwar scenario occupies every bit as large a part as the war narrative; Viola never does understand the forces that shaped her father or the fabric of the man he became. As a result, she cannot be called innocent and her own life is often in self-defined ruins.

Anyone who suspects that this book is less – well, inventive – than its predecessor will be suitably satisfied with Kate Atkinson’s sleight of hand. A God In Ruins is also the philosophical sibling of the earlier book; everything in life can change quickly – in a heartbeat – and life is little more than a single breath. That breath is particularly precarious during wartime (“All the birds who were never born, all the songs that were never sung and so can only exist in imagination.”)

The bottom line (again in the author’s words) is that “War is savage. For everyone. Innocent or guilty.” It dehumanizes us and in too many cases, it takes away our story. And THAT Is the brilliance that lies behind this work.

...more

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Dec 30, 2014 Phrynne rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I guess I just loved everything about this book except the cover but I won't knock any stars off for that. Kate Atkinson writes like a dream. The early parts of this book are slow but the prose is so good the slowness does not matter. And it needs to be read carefully anyway because at times the story flits backwards and forwards and the reader needs to be alert in order to keep track.

I enjoyed the fact that the book is set in the same world as Life After Life but focuses on Teddy instead of Ur ...more

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Aug 31, 2016 Steve rated it really liked it

I hope this doesn’t sound conceited, but you might crow, too, if you had just written one BILLION reviews. I have the magic of combinatorics to thank. There are nine different fill-in-the-blank sections in this review that allow ten separate candidates each which in the end will embody the text. That makes 10 to the 9th power (1,000,000,000) possible outcomes. If you want your own individualized version, take the digits of your Social Security Number or any other 9-digit sequence of your choosin ...more

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Jul 10, 2015 Elyse Walters rated it it was amazing

This is another case where I took a chance to read an author's book having not been a fan of a previous book.
If you read my review of "Life After Life", you'll see, I wasn't 'ga-ga' over that book!!!
I didn't 'jump' for joy when this first book came out either. PASS were my first thoughts!
Overtime ... I heard and read a few things about this 'companion' novel to have me re-consider ...( enough to enter a Goodreads give-a-way). No, I didn't win...
but my local thrift box had a 'like new' copy for ...more

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Jun 07, 2016 Katie rated it it was amazing

Shelves: set-in-the-uk, historical-fiction, published-2015

Perhaps the element of this novel that most moved me was the arrogant dismissive way the young often view older generations, especially children with regards to their parents. This is highlighted in the relationship between the obnoxiously brilliant Viola and her father Teddy. Teddy is/was a Bomber Command pilot during WW2. Almost nightly he goes through the harrowing experience of flying over Nazi Germany; the repressed guilt of dropping bombs on “innocent” civilians; the awareness that his dea ...more

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May 01, 2015 Sharon Bolton rated it it was amazing

“Despite the owl, which continued to hoot its unholy lullaby, he fell almost immediately into the deep and innocent sleep of the hopeful.”

First the confession. I didn’t really like Life After Life. Oh, I admit, it was a very clever idea, beautifully written, but for me, something was missing. It was all a bit random and, at times, (I may as well be honest) a wee bit annoying.

Something of a mixed blessing, then, to be sent an ARC of the “companion piece”, A God In Ruins. It’s a beautiful, limit “Despite the owl, which continued to hoot its unholy lullaby, he fell almost immediately into the deep and innocent sleep of the hopeful.”

First the confession. I didn’t really like Life After Life. Oh, I admit, it was a very clever idea, beautifully written, but for me, something was missing. It was all a bit random and, at times, (I may as well be honest) a wee bit annoying.

Something of a mixed blessing, then, to be sent an ARC of the “companion piece”, A God In Ruins. It’s a beautiful, limited-edition proof that will look great on the shelf, but did I really want to put myself through more of the same?

Well, I did, thank goodness, because A God In Ruins is one of the most extraordinary books I’ve ever read. It is the story of Ursula Todd’s younger brother, Teddy, who becomes a fighter pilot in World War 2, is one of the relative few to survive and who goes on to marry, have a daughter and a couple of grandchildren, and live to a ripe old age.

So what? Yes, I know, I’d be tempted to say the same if the book was ‘sold’ to me in that way. It’s difficult to explain quite why this is such an exquisite read, because there’s precious little in the way of plot, but it is testament to the sheer brilliance of Atkinson’s writing, that she can keep her reader so engaged without too much happening. Every incident, every character, is drawn with exquisite, sparkling colour, not a single detail seems superfluous and her dark, bitchy sense of humour weaves through the narrative like a glossy black ribbon.

The timeline jumps about a bit. The story is written from multiple points of view that occasionally leap up and take the reader by surprise, but otherwise I couldn’t fault this book. Well, maybe I could, just a tiny bit, because as I neared the end, I found myself thinking: ‘It’s a lovely book, but I’m not sure what the point of it is, other than the interest to be found even in very ordinary, common-place lives.’ In fairness, I’d have been happy to leave it at that, I was enjoying the read so much.

And then, oh my lord, the point!

The point of the book hit me like a blow from a sledgehammer. It made me cry. It made me feel like a complete fool. It left me in awe of Atkinson’s brilliance. It made me want to read Life After Life again. I cannot say more, just by mentioning that there is ‘something to come’ I may have already spoiled the surprise to some extent, and for that I apologise, but without referring to ‘the point’ it would be almost impossible to explain why I think this great, glorious heartbreak of a book will come to be considered one of the defining novels of our time.

PS: I did re-read Life After Life. I get it now. The rest of the world was right and I was wrong.
...more

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Jul 01, 2015 Teresa rated it liked it

Shortly before I finished this book last night, I read of the death of Nicholas Winton, aka Britain's Schindler, at the age of 106. He lived through the same time period, with a few years' difference on either side, as Atkinson's fictional Teddy, the favorite sibling of Ursula from Life After Life. While I was immediately captured by the latter book, this companion novel took a while for me to get into as I wondered where it was going. The ultimate destination is a spoiler and I'll address my is ...more

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Apr 14, 2016 Hugh rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: modern-lit, read-2017, modern-classics

This has been described as a sequel to Life After Life, but as Kate Atkinson says in her Author's Note at the end, "I like to think of it as a 'companion piece' rather than a sequel". It is similarly audacious and if anything even more moving, and I devoured it in three days.

This time centre stage is taken by Teddy Todd, the younger brother of Ursula, the heroine of Life After Life. The core story tells of his life as a bomber pilot in the Second World War, which is vividly described and emotion This has been described as a sequel to Life After Life, but as Kate Atkinson says in her Author's Note at the end, "I like to think of it as a 'companion piece' rather than a sequel". It is similarly audacious and if anything even more moving, and I devoured it in three days.

This time centre stage is taken by Teddy Todd, the younger brother of Ursula, the heroine of Life After Life. The core story tells of his life as a bomber pilot in the Second World War, which is vividly described and emotionally powerful. This only accounts for about a third of the book, as Teddy's struggles with civilian life before and after the war are also described in detail, and the chapters are chronologically scattered. Even within chapters and sentences Atkinson often can't resist throwing in asides about how the perceptions and expectations of her characters are confounded, with allusions to events several decades later. This is a bit like listening to an aged relative - descriptions of the distant past interspersed with comments about more recent events. Some events are described several times in different levels of detail.

Some chapters tell the story of Teddy's daughter Viola, who is a self-centred child of the sixties who becomes a writer of popular fiction, and her relationship with her children Sunny (a boy) and Bertie (a girl). Viola is a comic caricature, and provides much of the light relief which leavens the more serious material. Viola's character is partly shaped by the early death of Ted's wife Nancy from brain cancer, and her role in the story demonstrates how quickly history is forgotten by younger generations.

It is difficult to describe the ending without resorting to spoilers, and although this is a book which would reward re-reading I won't say too much here, except that although I felt it was cleverly handled it might have been even better to end with the devastating penultimate chapter. This is a minor quibble, and overall I was greatly impressed by the range of ideas, the variety of narrative styles and the way the whole thing coalesces.

A fine book, and possibly even better than Life After Life. ...more

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Mar 21, 2015 Jenne marked it as didnt-finish

I just cannot deal with Viola. Just no.

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Oct 20, 2017 Sandy *The world could end while I was reading and I would never notice* rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: own, contemporary-fiction, 4-star, family-drama, 2017, favourite-author, historical-fiction, purely-for-pleasure

EXCERPT: What had gone into the making of Teddy? Not slugs and snails, it was true, but generation upon generation of Beresfords and Todds, all coming to one singular point in a cold bed in the chill of an autumn night when his father had caught hold of the golden rope of his mother's hair and hadn't let go until he had hauled them both to the far shore (they had many euphemisms for the act). As they lay amongst the shipwreck of the marital bed they each felt slightly befuddled by the unexpecte EXCERPT: What had gone into the making of Teddy? Not slugs and snails, it was true, but generation upon generation of Beresfords and Todds, all coming to one singular point in a cold bed in the chill of an autumn night when his father had caught hold of the golden rope of his mother's hair and hadn't let go until he had hauled them both to the far shore (they had many euphemisms for the act). As they lay amongst the shipwreck of the marital bed they each felt slightly befuddled by the unexpected ardor of the other. Hugh cleared his throat and murmured, 'A voyage into the deep, eh?' Sylvie said nothing as she felt the seafaring metaphor had been stretched far enough.

But the grain had entered the shell (Sylvie's own metaphoric stance) and the pearl that would be Edward Beresford Todd began to grow until he was revealed into the sunshine that came before the Great War and lay happily for hours on end in his pram with nothing but a silver hare dangling from the pram hood for company.

THE BLURB: In Life After Life Ursula Todd lived through the turbulent events of the last century again and again. In A God in Ruins, Atkinson turns her focus on Ursula’s beloved younger brother Teddy – would-be poet, RAF bomber pilot, husband and father – as he navigates the perils and progress of the 20th century. For all Teddy endures in battle, his greatest challenge will be to face living in a future he never expected to have.

MY THOUGHTS: This is a complex book. There seems to be no order to it. It randomly jumps from Teddy's childhood, to his old age, to his war years and back, interspersed with the lives of his one daughter, Viola, and her two children, Sunny and Bertie, and back again.

And yet, with her own inimitable style, Kate Atkinson pulls it off and rather splendidly at that. It is like sitting with a loved elderly relative, listening to them reminisce, where one memory leads to another, the tenuous thread that connects them known only to the narrator. And yet Atkinson draws you into this family. I laughed, I cried. I seethed at Viola's indifference to her children, her father. I flew with Teddy on his sorties over Germany, crossing my fingers to keep him safe. I applauded his rescue of Sunny (aka Philip Villiers) from the Villiers enclave, and his careful nurturing of Bertie. And I wept at his gentle decline in residential care.

This is both a heart-wrenching and heartwarming read.

All opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own. Please refer to my Goodreads.com profile page or the 'about' page on sandysbookaday.wordpress.com for an explanation of my rating system. This review and others are also published on my blog sandysbookaday.wordpress.com
https://wordpress.com/post/sandysbook... ...more

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Nov 18, 2015 BrokenTune rated it it was ok

Shelves: reviewed

I DNF'd this book last night.

I was so bored with A God in Ruins that I skipped the second half of the book and advanced to the end of the book.

There is a twist at the end of the story, but it was too little and too late, and I had kind of predicted it anyway.

As with Life After Life, it was not the writing that put me off. Kate Atkinson clearly has a talent for writing beautiful prose. My problem was again with the plot.

I found it very hard to get invested in the story of Teddy, the brother of Ur ...more

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Feb 01, 2015 Julie Christine rated it really liked it

Shelves: contemporary-fiction, read-2015, british-isles-theme-setting, historical-fiction, war-conflict

“The whole edifice of civilization turned out to be constructed from an unstable mix of quicksand and imagination.”
― Kate Atkinson, A God in Ruins

"It's still the same old story
A fight for love and glory
A case of do or die
The world will always welcome lovers
As time goes by"
-Frank Sinatra, As Time Goes By

In the 2013 déjà-vu epic Life After Life Kate Atkinson played out "what if?" in a loop-de-loop plot that tossed narrative structure to the wind. It is a brilliant, confounding, playful and po ...more

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Aug 06, 2017 Heidi The Reader rated it it was ok

Shelves: fiction, historical-fiction

Even though Kate Atkinson took readers back into the beautiful world that she created for the Todd family, this story wasn't nearly as enjoyable as Life After Life.

This time, the story focused on Teddy. It is told through the mixed up timeline that I've come to expect from Atkinson. We get to see Teddy's relationships, family and inner thoughts.

It didn't have the magic of Ursula's story, in my opinion. In Life After Life, I was enthralled. For the majority of A God in Ruins, I was not.

I was surp ...more

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Apr 28, 2015 Kim rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: all-time-favourites

"A man is a God in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal,as gently as we awake from dreams" - Ralph Waldo Emerson

In this companion piece to Life After Life Atkinson writes about Teddy Todd: beloved younger brother of Ursula, would-be poet, husband, father, grandfather, World War II bomber pilot. In it, she breathes life into themes that are both extraordinary and mundane: the shortness and fragility of life, the certainty of death, the fall from gra ...more

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Mar 23, 2015 Sue rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: kindle, historical-fiction, read-2016, favorite-authors, britain

I regret so much that I never got back to write a review close to when I finished reading this book. It's unfair to my reading experience, the book and the author. But I didn't want to leave this spot empty forever so I will add a bit. For those who have read Life After Life, I definitely recommend this. For those who haven't, it likely will stand alone but will lose some of it's meaning because of the inter-related stories.

I am going to include what I wrote in a late status update when I finis ...more

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Jun 02, 2015 Gary the Bookworm rated it it was amazing

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Dec 24, 2014 Joanne Harris rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I received an ARC of this from the publisher. The cover of the book reads: What if the new Kate Atkinson were even better than the last? Well, A God in Ruins is in some ways similar to Life After Life. It’s a companion piece, built along a similarly complex timeline and focusing on the life of Ursula Todd’s younger brother Teddy; his part in the War; his marriage; his reluctant navigation of the perilous, shifting waters of the twentieth century. Like all Kate Atkinson’s work, it is a masterly
I received an ARC of this from the publisher. The cover of the book reads: What if the new Kate Atkinson were even better than the last? Well, A God in Ruins is in some ways similar to Life After Life. It’s a companion piece, built along a similarly complex timeline and focusing on the life of Ursula Todd’s younger brother Teddy; his part in the War; his marriage; his reluctant navigation of the perilous, shifting waters of the twentieth century. Like all Kate Atkinson’s work, it is a masterly piece of writing; the prose is clear and elegant; sometimes wryly humorous; often touching and with a wistful awareness of passing time that underpins the narrative with a constant sense of melancholy.
There is, however, an odd disparity between the portrayal of the characters – those of the older generation are lovingly and richly drawn, while the younger ones (and most of the minor characters) are often prone to caricature and stereotype. We have characters coded according to accent, region, hair colour, social class and the kind of newspaper they read; and Viola, Teddy’s daughter, embodies every hippie cliché there is (Vegetarianism, life in a commune, homespun clothing, lentils, a couple of children named Sun and Moon). There’s also a tendency to characterize through little asides, helpfully delivered by other members of the cast, as if anticipating questions from an eventual readers’ group. Thus, at one point, Teddy asks himself if his assessment of his daughter’s personality counts as cod-psychology (it does); later, he muses, rather self-consciously, that Viola’s difficult character may have been shaped by her mother’s early death (it has). It is a kind of ironic wink to the reader – but that irony is also the means of keeping us at a distance; of reminding us that we are simply reading fragments of narrative on a page. I love Kate Atkinson’s writing. It is beautiful and perfectly-pitched - but there is an emotional detachment to her narrative that I have always found a little frustrating. To me, it often seems aloof, teasing the emotions, but deliberately withdrawing the hand just before it reaches the heart. Brilliant but (this may be my fault) ultimately, leaving me cold.
...more

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Jun 10, 2015 Helle rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: english, historical-fiction

This novel is why I read.

I first met Kate Atkinson in Life after Life, which, while not quite being a five-star read for me, made me want to explore her work further. A God in Ruins, a companion to Life after Life, revisits the same characters and adds layers of story and understanding to the lives of the Todd family. (You do not have to read Life after Life first; they are not chronologically sequenced).

The heart of this novel is Teddy, an RAF bomber pilot in World War II, the sister of Ursula ...more

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Mar 14, 2015 Trish rated it it was amazing

Shelves: british, art, funny, family, fiction, literature, parenting, war, audio, buddhism

Atkinson returns to her theme of “What If” in this companion volume to Life After Life in which we met Ursula Todd and many possible iterations of her life. Ursula’s brother Teddy and his family take center stage in this novel and the generation gap is caught beautifully as Atkinson articulates the view from Ted and that of his only daughter, Viola. Viola’s son and daughter, Sunny and Bertie, exhibit an equal distance from understanding their own mother’s life choices and personality.

Kate Atkin Atkinson returns to her theme of “What If” in this companion volume to Life After Life in which we met Ursula Todd and many possible iterations of her life. Ursula’s brother Teddy and his family take center stage in this novel and the generation gap is caught beautifully as Atkinson articulates the view from Ted and that of his only daughter, Viola. Viola’s son and daughter, Sunny and Bertie, exhibit an equal distance from understanding their own mother’s life choices and personality.

Kate Atkinson adds an Author’s Note at the end of this story which tells us much of what she was communicating in this novel. “It is about fiction,” she tells us. “We must imagine what we cannot know.” Atkinson chose to look at the Second World War, and makes her central character an RAF airman. Teddy, we wonder at the end, does he even exist? That’s the thing about fiction. All that attention, care, and love lavished, and in the end, they are only characters on paper. But Atkinson caught enough truth in her writing that we know these characters, Ted, Viola, Sunny, are real enough within each of us.

What I like best about Atkinson’s work is her sense of humor about the tragedies of human life. She is a wonderful storyteller on the order of a Bruegel painting: large canvas, detailed figures not all doing the good and great thing. She gives us history, and we see the now, but we also get potential for the future. She does not leave us feeling that the thoughtful or erudite must be gloomy or humorless. With this two-book fiction, she gives us enough distance to see possible outcomes of decisions made now, and we always have the sense that we can change the outcomes if we don’t like where we’re headed. Her characters are complex enough to exhibit the petty and the grand. Once again, we always have a sense of possibility: character is malleable! We can change.

Atkinson tells us that this novel is “about fiction…and the Fall of Man from grace.” She indicates many references in the novel to Utopia, the Garden, the Way and then the falling, rising pattern of the characters, birds, planes correspond to what she is trying to convey. War is a fall from grace. And no matter how we frame the argument, innocents become victims. Atkinson reiterates that she is not a polemicist so wants her characters instead to express doubt and insecurity about the notion of the efficacy of war.

The thing about Atkinson’s fiction is that it is capacious enough to include the traditions of the past with the irresistible freshness and piquancy and social criticism of now. She does a marvelous job of telling a rip-snorting story at the same time she is urging caution. She was always a wonderful writer of fiction. She is in the process of becoming a great one.

A word about the audio production of this title: Hachette Audio did a brilliant job of producing this audio, read with terrific understanding by Alex Jennings. It is highly recommended. However, if one is familiar with Kate Atkinson's work, one will note that Atkinson has a tendency to move easily and quickly forward and back in time and between outlooks of various characters. One shift that was particularly difficult for me to catch in the audio was the story of Augustus. At the end, when I realized the importance of Augustus, I had to admit I didn't understand where he fit in. One glance at the paper copy set things straight for me since Augustus' story is set in different type in paper.
...more

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Apr 27, 2015 Mary rated it liked it

I hated myself for not loving this book. I was stunned by Life after Life. I waited anxiously for this book. And while I did love many parts, I didn't like others. Atkinson is a wonderful writer, her characters are all interesting and unique. Her stories are quite compelling, disturbing, historically perfect. I ate up everything, except for the actual war stories. While Teddy was flying, piloting, I found myself skipping over those parts. They held no interest for me, and I was mad at myself but ...more

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Jan 29, 2016 Barbara rated it liked it

3.5 stars

This second book in the 'Todd Family' saga concentates on Teddy Todd. It works well as a standalone.

*****

"A God in Ruins" revolves around Teddy Todd, who - in a nutshell - grew up in the English countryside, was the apple of his mother's eye, lost his loving father, was close to his sister Ursula, became a bomber pilot in WWII, married his childhood sweetheart, worked as a journalist, had a horrid narcissistic daughter, helped raise his grandchildren, got old, and died.

The book rep ...more

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Aug 27, 2015 Ellie rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2015indchallenge, library, war, family, fiction, favorites

Kate Atkinson is one of my favorite authors. I love her Jackson Brody detective series. I loved the quirky Life After Life in which the heroine, Ursula, keeps dying and coming back to life. Not being much of a reader of war stories (with exceptions such as the brilliant The Things They Carried) I was apprehensive about A God in Ruins, the story of Ursula's beloved brother Teddy, described as a companion novel to Life After Life. The book tells the story of Teddy's experience as a fighter pilot d Kate Atkinson is one of my favorite authors. I love her Jackson Brody detective series. I loved the quirky Life After Life in which the heroine, Ursula, keeps dying and coming back to life. Not being much of a reader of war stories (with exceptions such as the brilliant The Things They Carried) I was apprehensive about A God in Ruins, the story of Ursula's beloved brother Teddy, described as a companion novel to Life After Life. The book tells the story of Teddy's experience as a fighter pilot during World War II.

As my five star rating probably shows, my worry was groundless. I adored A God in Ruins, which I read somewhat breathlessly in two sittings (I was worried that I wouldn't finish this 553 page novel in the week's time I had from the library. Clearly, I worry too much.) There's a lot about Teddy's life before and after the war, a lot of the workings of family and relationships, maybe more than there is about the war. But the war and Teddy's role in it are vividly described, and I found those pages both gripping and often harrowing.

Atkinson clearly admires and supports the young men (boys, really) who fought the war but she doesn't ignore the bombing of civilians, a deliberate campaign that may or may not have actually helped the Allies win the war. However, she never questions the heroism of the soldiers, here represented by the RAF. I felt especially close to the story as my father was a gunner in the American air force. Reading Teddy's story, I understood why my father talked about his war experiences sparingly, focusing on his time between flights.

I rarely feel as involved in the lives of a book's characters, not since I was a child have I felt as passionately about fictional people as I did with this book. I felt angry on Teddy's behalf at his daughter Viola's constant rejection of him. This is no spoiler; as with so much of this book, we find out much about Teddy and Viola's relationship at the outset. Many critical events are revealed early in the story, long before they actually occur in the timeline of the story.

The book is written in sections that jump around chronologically so that a chapter set in 1947 may follow or be followed by events taking place in 1993, 2011, or 1925. This reduces some, but not all, plot surprises.

The end of the novel is a serious shock and probably will make-or-break readers' ultimate response to the novel. I was shocked and a little angry but it did intrigue me.

Ultimately, I loved this novel and its characters (even the awful Viola, Teddy's daughter). I highly recommend this book to anyone who appreciates excellent writing and passionate story-telling (it's also amazingly well researched). It made me think about second World War more deeply and its cost (and all the other wars we fight) to everyone. ...more

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Jun 18, 2015 switterbug (Betsey) rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorite-books-i-have-reviewed

“The dead were legion, and remembrance was a kind of duty…not always related to love.”

This is Atkinson’s companion piece (her words) to Life After Life, the story of the privileged Todd family in Fox Corner, in England, with WW II as the highlight of events. A GOD IN RUINS could be read without having read the previous novel, but it has so much more meaning if you read them both. This is a tour de force, and after having closed the last page in tears, and meditated on this astounding book, perha ...more

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Jul 20, 2015 PattyMacDotComma rated it really liked it

Shelves: award-win-listed, aa, aa-ce, kindle

“As you got older and time went on, you realized that the distinction between truth and fiction didn’t really matter because eventually everything disappeared into the soupy, amnesiac mess of history. Personal or political, it made no difference.”

4★
What if? Almost exactly a year ago, I enjoyed Ursula’s repeating “What if?” story in Atkinson’s Life After Life, (which I reviewed here https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... and I was looking forward to this about brother Teddy. But I was more than ...more

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Aug 28, 2017 Sam rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 2017-reads, aty-challenge-2017

Gobsmacked and in tears at the end. Full review to follow. A worthy sequel to Life After Life, and I'd argue made the better if you read them in order, but also a thing of Beauty and Art (nods to Sylvie) on its own.

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Apr 20, 2020 Katie Lumsden rated it really liked it

As always, Kate Atkinson's writing is remarkably beautiful, moving and readable. She's a real master of character. I will say that I thought this was a little too long, and that the ending slightly spoiled it for me, but it was still for the most part a joy to read.

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Mar 22, 2015 Connie G rated it really liked it

Shelves: historical-fiction, world-war-ii, war, aviation, england

A God in Ruins is a companion novel to Life After Life, the story of Ursula Todd who expired and was reborn multiple times during the first half of the 20th Century. Her brother Teddy was a RAF pilot during World War II who was shot down and missing in action. In A God in Ruins we learn that he had been in a German POW camp for two years before returning to England.

The book is written with a constant shifting back and forth in time. The story starts slowly with incidents about Teddy's childhood ...more

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topics	posts	views	last activity
Bookworm Bitches : August 2018: A God in Ruins	5	61	Aug 25, 2019 06:02AM
What do you think about the ending?spoilers	15	1439	Oct 29, 2018 07:11PM
Hough's Neck Book...: Finally started this one!	3	11	Nov 15, 2017 08:06PM
Play Book Tag: A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson - 4 stars	7	20	Aug 01, 2017 09:48PM
Spine Crackers: A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson	1	33	Jul 15, 2016 10:56AM
Goodreads Choice ...: A God in Ruins - June 2016	10	61	Jun 29, 2016 09:15AM
Around the Year i...: A God in Ruins, by Kate Atkinson	3	23	Jun 13, 2016 02:44AM

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About Kate Atkinson

Kate Atkinson

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Kate Atkinson was born in York and now lives in Edinburgh. Her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and she has been a critically acclaimed international bestselling author ever since.

She is the author of a collection of short stories, Not the End of the World, and of the critically acclaimed novels Human Croquet, Emotionally Weird, Case Histories, ...more