The current research provides a comparative discussion of contingency in Kate Atkinson's Life After Life and Ahmed Saadawi's Frankenstein in Baghdad. The research aims to question in what ways the two books discussing war experience in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries define the issues of causality in relation to historicity as contingency, recursion, fragmentation, violence, and retrospection. In particular, the current research employs the tools of chaos and complexity theory (rather than as a scientific concept), close reading, and historical comparative narratology in order to show that both Atkinson's and Saadawi's books show contingency not as opposed to determined history, but as a force of action. In Atkinson's repeated biography of Ursula Todd, for example, the same conditions produce different outcomes since the slightest bodily and affective incidents change everything. At the same time, through repetitions, the novel shows structural attractors and thereby limits the effects of the possible alternative’s patriarchy, fascism, war, domestic violence, and class structure. While the latter is evident in Atkinson's novel, Saadawi in his Frankenstein in Baghdad describes the city biopolitics of Baghdad and the creation of the monster, called Whatsitsname, through the decomposition of bodies and their stories. Through the application of the concept of grotesque ontology, it will be shown how the narrative depicts the feedback loop between occupation, representation, and retaliation. Overall, both novels allow stating that in the context of history, people have an opportunity to use their agency regardless of whether it is supported or undermined by various systems.