Thank you to Ms. Atkinson for creating this brilliant but accessible novel that I can (and will) recommend to everyone I know. For once this year I read in no particular hurry, happy to savor the characters, to grin at the clever asides, and to marvel at how Atkinson linked the iterations of Ursula's life with such precision. I loved how multiple telling of the same event allowed for different characters to have their say and for different events to come to the fore. I admired how even when some events were altered, she wrote some things exactly the same, down to the wording. One example I recall is Sylvie telling Ursula that she should enjoy lolling about reading because that time in her life would not last. It's so true and yet you could have told me this over and over when I was young and I would not have understood it. It's a joke, see? Atkinson does a wonderful job playing with the concept of how time plays with us and how we might play with it, if given the chance. 
 I very much appreciate when even the tiniest details are done right. For example, the name of a minor character in the book - Ursula's "gung ho" travelling companion - was Kathy. Tell me you don't know a gung ho Kathy! I I do my best to read different sorts of books so that I don't get boxed in to one kind of genre or style but if my life kept repeating the way Ursula's does in the novel, I can assure you that in every version I would pick up this novel and think ah, here is 'a thing of great beauty'. ;)