-
Your next favorite book
is waiting.
Summary | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Discuss | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
A Novel (Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition)
by Kate Atkinson
Book Reviewed by:A twenty-fifth anniversary edition of award-winning, bestselling author Kate Atkinson's debut novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, a deeply moving and deeply funny family story of happiness and heartbreak.
Ruby Lennox begins narrating her own life at the moment of her conception and from there takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of the twentieth century as seen through the eyes of a girl determined to learn more about her family and the secrets it keeps.
Kate Atkinson's dazzling first novel, named the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year in England, is a darkly comic, deeply moving story of family heartbreak and happiness.
CHAPTER ONE
1951
Conception
I exist! I am conceived to the chimes of midnight on the clock on the mantelpiece in the room across the hall. The clock once belonged to my great-grandmother (a woman called Alice) and its tired chime counts me into the world. I'm begun on the first stroke and finished on the last when my father rolls off my mother and is plunged into a dreamless sleep, thanks to the five pints of John Smith's Best Bitter he has drunk in the Punch Bowl with his friends, Walter and Bernard Belling. At the moment at which I moved from nothingness into being my mother was pretending to be asleep – as she often does at such moments. My father, however, is made of stern stuff and he didn't let that put him off.
My father's name is George and he is a good ten years older than my mother, who is now snoring into the next pillow. My mother's name is Berenice but everyone has always called her Bunty.
'Bunty' doesn't seem like a very grown-up name to me – would I be better ...
Death at the Sign of the Rook is Kate Atkinson’s sixth book in the Jackson Brodie series. Have you read any of the others, and if so, how does this one compare? What do you like most about the series?
I have read to books by Atkinson. Behind the Scenes of a Museum was a favorite. Life after Life had great character, but it was a little confusing, I bought the book not know it was what it was. I did not like it until a couple months later. It was discussed in a friend book group. The incites of...
-Renee_P
Ruby's own story of growing up as the product of a loveless marriage and in a household that has seen more than its fair share of domestic tragedy is interspersed with chapters that ostensibly take the form of footnotes... these are where much of the novel's narrative takes place, as an omniscient Ruby gazes back through four generations of her family, illustrating the losses and traumas that reverberate across the decades, the patterns and decisions that echo through the years...continued
Full Review
(714 words)
(Reviewed by Norah Piehl).
Alternate chapters in Kate Atkinson's novel Behind the Scenes at the Museum are "footnotes" to the main narrative, ostensibly offering background information about specific objects but actually offering windows into the history of generations of the narrator's family. Atkinson is not the only novelist to play with footnotes or endnotes as narrative devices; here are a few other examples of novels where readers definitely won't want to gloss over the footnotes.
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
At more than a thousand pages, Wallace's novel isn't just encyclopedic in length; it also includes 388 endnotes, some of which have footnotes of their own, that take up almost a tenth of the novel. These endnotes aren't just afterthoughts:...
If you liked Behind the Scenes at the Museum, try these:
by Olivia Wolfgang-Smith
Published 2025
A gorgeously written and irresistibly intimate queer novel that follows one family across four generations to explore legacy and identity in all its forms.
The History of a Difficult Child
by Mihret Sibhat
Published 2024
A breathtaking, tragicomic debut novel about the indomitable child of a scorned, formerly land-owning family who must grow up in the wake of Ethiopia's socialist revolution
by Miriam Toews
Published 2023
From the bestselling author of Women Talking and All My Puny Sorrows, a compassionate, darkly humorous, and deeply wise new novel about three generations of women.
The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Can you name the title?
Test your book knowledge with our daily trivia challenge!
