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 later iterations of her life she dies as a child - drowning in the sea, or when saved from that, by falling to her death from the roof when trying to retrieve a fallen doll.

Then there is an unhappy life where she is traumatised by being raped, getting pregnant and undergoing an illegal abortion, and finally becoming trapped in a highly oppressive marriage, and being killed by her abusive husband when trying to escape.

Ursula eventually comes to realize, through a particularly strong sense of deja vu, from her previous lives, and decides to try to prevent the war by killing Adolf Hitler in late 1930.

What is left unclear - since each of the time sequences end with "darkness" and Ursula's death and does not show what followed - is whether in fact all these lives actually occurred in an objective world, or were only subjectively experienced by her.

[6] On the July/August 2013 issue of Bookmarks, the book received a (4.0 out of 5) with the critical summary saying, "If Atkinson's protagonist serves as a voice for many stories, the author handles her multi-pronged tale with the ease of a pro".

Clark argued that the novel "[co-opts] the family [...] and [uses] it to show how fiction works and what it might mean to us [...] with an emotional delicacy and understanding that transcend experiment or playfulness.

She described it as having an "engaging cast of characters" and called the depiction of the British experience of World War II "gutsy and deeply disturbing, just as the author intends it to be.

"[11] Francine Prose of The New York Times wrote that Atkinson "nimbly succeeds in keeping the novel from becoming confusing" and argued that the work "makes the reader acutely conscious of an author’s power: how much the novelist can do.

He said the high-concept premise of "Ursula [contriving] to avoid the accident that previously killed her [...] blends uneasily with what is otherwise a deft and convincing portrayal of an English family's evolution across two world wars [...] all the other characters seem complexly armed with free will."

But Sacks also said that "she [brings] characters to life with enviable ease", referring to the erosion of Sylvie and Hugh's marriage as "poignantly charted".

[13] In NPR, novelist Meg Wolitzer suggested that the book proves that "a fully-realised world" is more important to the success of a fiction work than the progression of its story, and dubbed it a "major, serious yet playfully experimental novel".

"[17] It was listed as one of the decade's top 10 fiction works by Time, where it was billed as "a defining account of wartime London, as Ursula experiences the devastation of the Blitz from various perspectives, highlighting the senselessness of bombing raids.