Ursula Todd

The novel has an unusual structure, repeatedly looping back in time to describe alternative possible lives for its central character, Ursula Todd, who is born on 11 February 1910 to an upper-middle-class family near Chalfont St Peter in Buckinghamshire. In the first version, she is strangled by her umbilical cord and stillborn. Later iterations of her life take her into World War Two, where she works in London for the War Office and repeatedly witnesses the results of the Blitz including a direct hit on a bomb shelter in Argyll Road in November 1940. There is also a life in which she married a German in 1934, is unable to return to England and experiences the war in Berlin under the allied bombings. Todd eventually comes to realize, through a particularly strong sense of deja vu, that she has lived before, and decides to try to prevent the war by killing Adolf Hitler in late 1930.