Life After Life: Kate Atkinson, 2013

A most peculiar and engaging novel by a Whitbread Prize winner, this is the story of Ursula Beresford Todd the third child of Sylvie and Hugh who is born with a strange ability, the capacity to see the future and alter it.  We are taken on a suspenseful journey as Ursula dies in childbirth (a nuchal cord, no less), falls off a roof, drowns at the beach, is murdered by a pedophile, dies with influenza, perishes from a septic abortion, is beaten to death by her abusive husband, dies in a Luftwaffe blitz in a basement in London, and dies from starvation in bombed out Berlin along with her daughter, except that none of these very possible events happens.  It turns out that Ursula has a gift of seeing and altering the future, and she uses it to assassinate Hitler in 1930 before he can turn the world upside down.  Confusing and often totally opaque at times, but clever and very well-paced, this is a gripping novel and worth reading, if for nothing else that to get to know the redoubtable Ursula!