"Life After Life," by Kate Atkinson "After the first death, there is no other," Dylan Thomas wrote. How obvious, one might think. But the one-time-only nature of death is anything but self-evident in Kate Atkinson's new novel, "Life After Life." Its heroine, Ursula Todd, keeps dying, then dying again. She dies when she is being born, on a snowy night in 1910. As a child, she drowns, falls off a roof and contracts influenza. Later, she commits suicide and is murdered. She is killed during the German bombing of London in World War II and ends her life in the ruins of Berlin in 1945. Each time Ursula dies, Atkinson - a British writer best known here as the author of "Case Histories," the first in a series of highly entertaining mysteries featuring the sleuth Jackson Brodie - resurrects her and sets her on one of the many alternate courses that her destiny might have taken. A great deal of experience, and 20th-century history, transpires in the intervals separating Ursula's sudden and often violent exits from the world of the living. The novel begins with a scene in which she assassinates Hitler. Her serial and parallel existences take her through two brutal world wars and well into the 1960s. But each turn in her story is, like the end (s) of her life, subject to revision. As a teenager living at Fox Corner, her family home in the British countryside, she is raped and becomes pregnant, but in another version the encounter with her American attacker involves little more than a stolen kiss. A bullying first marriage is endured, and its ensuing tragedy wiped clean from the slate. Romances begin and end, then begin again, taking different trajectories. Ursula learns about her father's death in a letter she receives in Germany, where she has been trapped by the outbreak of World War II, and where she befriends Eva Braun and visits the Führer at his mountaintop retreat. But in a different rendition, she is in England when her father succumbs to a heart attack, and with her family for his funeral. A murdered child turns out not to be dead. Or is she? A dog named Lucky makes cameo appearances that the reader can't help seeing through the scrim of the transient but critical roles that the dog has already played in the plot. The mostly brief chapters, dated by month and year, keep us oriented amid the rapid chronological shifts backward and forward. And there are several relatively still points around which the whirling machinery turns. Sylvie, Ursula's mother, remains dependably snobbish and caustic, just as Ursula's free-spirited Aunt Izzie continues to provide shelter, help and the example of nervy rebelliousness for which such aunts are created in fiction and film. In several of her lives, Ursula attends secretarial school in London and travels in Continental Europe. Atkinson's juggling a lot at once - and nimbly succeeds in keeping the novel from becoming confusing. Even so, reading the book is a mildly vertiginous experience, rather like using the "scenes" function on a DVD to scramble the film's original order. At times "Life After Life" suggests a cross between Noël Coward's "Brief Encounter" and those interactive "hypertext" novels whose computer-savvy readers can determine the direction of the story. The first few reverses are startling, but after a while it begins to seem quite normal (if still pleasantly jolting) when a character who, we think, has left the narrative forever reappears in another guise or is seen from a new perspective. And the surprise of what happens is less intense than the unexpectedness of what doesn't happen: what seemingly irreversible damage is repaired with the "delete" key. In theory, this narrative method should violate one of the most basic contracts a writer makes with the reader: the promise that what happens to the characters actually does (insofar as the author knows) happen to the characters. But it's interesting to note how quickly Atkinson's new rules replace the old ones, how assuredly she rewrites the contract: we will stay tuned as long as she keeps us interested and curious about what all this is adding up to. Each tragedy continues to surprise and disturb us, even as we learn to expect that the victim will be all right in the morning. Francine Prose's most recent novel is "My New American Life."