Kate Atkinson

Atkinson took the Whitbread book of the year in 1995 with a first novel, beating Salman Rushdie, and the literary establishment complained about it for some time afterwards. Behind the Scenes at the Museum is a family history told backwards through its objects. Life After Life hands a woman born in 1910 the same life repeatedly, with a different death each time, and the structure is the argument rather than a gimmick. The Jackson Brodie books, Big Sky among them, are crime novels she writes when she feels like it. Transcription concerns wartime intelligence transcribers.