"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-sawy 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. Inevitably, metaphysics creeps in. We travel and return to the psychiatrist's office where Ursula's parents take her, at age 10, for sessions in which the conversation touches on reincarnation and the nature of time. When Dr. Kellet suggests that the moody, spacey Ursula may be remembering other lives and asks her to draw something, she produces a snake with its tail in its mouth. "It's a symbol representing the circularity of the universe," the doctor explains. "Time is a construct, in reality everything flows, no past or present, only the now." Atkinson is having fun with this, as she often seems to be in the novel, which is as much about writing as it is about anything else. So many excellent books are read and quoted by its characters that the novel could provide a useful bibliography. Here's a partial list of writers alluded to in these pages: Austen, Byron, Keats, Eliot (George and T. S.), Dante, Dickens, Donne, Marvell, D.H. Lawrence, Ibsen and Marlowe. It crosses one's mind that Ursula's marriage to the controlling and bullying Derek Oliphant, fervently at work on his textbook about the Tudors and the Plantagenets, seems familiar. Eventually, Ursula discovers that her husband's book is basically nonsense, and comes to the conclusion that fans of "Middlemarch" will already have reached. "She had married a Casaubon, she realized." Ursula takes "The Magic Mountain" with her when she goes up to the Berghof with Eva Braun, only to be informed, by a "nice" officer in the Wehrmacht, that Mann's novel is one of the books that have been banned by the Nazi Party. And one of the dark plot threads running through the weft of the novel - the disappearance of a little girl - recalls Atkinson's own "Case Histories." "LIFE AFTER LIFE" makes the reader acutely conscious of an author's power: how much the novelist can do. Kill a character, bring her back. Start a world war or prevent one. Bomb London, destroy Berlin. Write a scene from one point of view, then rewrite it from another. Try it this way, then that Make your character perish in a bombed-out building during the blitz, then make her part of the rescue team that (in a scene with the same telling details) tries unsuccessfully to save her. One of the things I like most about British mystery novels (including Kate Atkinson's) is the combination of good writing and a certain theatrical bravado. Their authors enjoy showing us how expertly they can construct a puzzle, then solve it: the literary equivalent of pulling a rabbit out of a hat. "Life After Life" inspires a similar sort of admiration, as Atkinson sharpens our awareness of the apparently limitless choices and decisions that a novelist must make on every page, and of what is gained and lost when the consequences of these choices are, like life, singular and final. The heroine keeps dying, then dying again. She dies when she is born, on a snowy night in 1910. Fremerne Prose's most recent novel is "My New American Life."