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Understanding Kate Atkinson -- A postmodern trilogy? : Behind the scenes at the museum, Human croquet, and Emotionally weird -- Short fiction : Not the end of the world -- Detective fiction : the Jackson Brodie novels -- War and other things : Life after life, A God in ruins, and Transcription. "Author of eleven novels, a collection of short stories, and a play, Kate Atkinson has won numerous prestigious literary awards (including the Whitbread and the Costa, twice), and yet is sometimes overlooked as a writer of popular, "middlebrow" fiction. In Understanding Kate Atkinson, Brian Diemert explores these contradictory receptions by plumbing the depths of the narrative sophistication that has landed Atkinson her enviable award-winning and bestselling status--and addressing the sexism in discussions of her first novel and major award in 1995. Diemert divides Atkinson's career into into four, mostly chronological phases: three stand-alone novels of families and their secrets; an interlude during which she published a collection of short stories and a play; five mysteries featuring Jackson Brodie as an investigator; and three recent historical novels dealing with aspects of the Second World War. These sections of the book highlight the distinct genres that Atkinson has adopted, but as Diemert shows, the shifting narrative timeframes and recurring themes of family relationships and buried secrets that make her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, so compelling have remained constantly present throughout Atkinson's body of work. A student of American postmodernism, Atkinson juggles numerous narrative strands in each of her texts, playful literary allusions, unreliable narrators, and questions of trauma and memory--her work is immanently readable, but with Diemert as their guide, readers will have the pleasure of deepening their understanding of each of Atkinson's books"--
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