Life after Life is about a woman named Ursula who relives her life all over again. Each of her life's timelines begins in the year 1910 with her difficult birth and ends with her sudden death, which is a beginning of another timeline. In the first timeline she dies as a child while swimming with her sister Pamela. In the next one, she is saved from drowning, but later dies from Spanish flu, along with her family's maid Bridget and her little brother Teddy.
As she relives her lives, Ursula begins to have moments of déjà vu, or she is able to predict future and even instinctively sense danger. In the following timelines she is eager to stop Bridget from going to London, so she doesn't catch the flu. In the following timelines we get to see Ursula further into the future, studying literature, going through an abusive marriage which ends her life, traveling to Germany where she meets and becomes friends with Hitler's mistress Eva and dying in the Second World War.
It appears that each timeline is an opportunity for Ursula to get things right. In one of the last timelines in the book, she is working as a rescuer in London during the Second World War under a woman called Ms. Woolf. In this life, she loses her brother Teddy in war, her mother kills herself and Ursula reaches old age and after she dies she is born again in 1910.
The book ends with Ursula becoming aware of her recurring existence in this last timeline and discovers that she is something called a witness and that her ultimate goal is to find a way to eliminate Hitler and prevent the Second World War. In this final timeline, she kills Hitler with her death following immediately after. The book ends with the year 1910 again, with a girl about to be born during a heavy snowstorm.
