A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Washington Post • NPR • Entertainment Weekly • Real Simple • Marie Claire • New York Public Library • LibraryReads • The Skimm • Lit Hub • Lit Reactor AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER“A captivating family saga.”—The New York Times Book Review“This literary family saga is perfect for fans of Celeste Ng and Donna Tartt.”—People Magazine (Book of the Week)If you knew the … captivating family saga.”—The New York Times Book Review
“This literary family saga is perfect for fans of Celeste Ng and Donna Tartt.”—People Magazine (Book of the Week)
If you knew the date of your death, how would you live your life?
It’s 1969 in New York City’s Lower East Side, and word has spread of the arrival of a mystical woman, a traveling psychic who claims to be able to tell anyone the day they will die. The Gold children—four adolescents on the cusp of self-awareness—sneak out to hear their fortunes.
The prophecies inform their next five decades. Golden-boy Simon escapes to the West Coast, searching for love in ’80s San Francisco; dreamy Klara becomes a Las Vegas magician, obsessed with blurring reality and fantasy; eldest son Daniel seeks security as an army doctor post-9/11; and bookish Varya throws herself into longevity research, where she tests the boundary between science and immortality.
A sweeping novel of remarkable ambition and depth, The Immortalists probes the line between destiny and choice, reality and illusion, this world and the next. It is a deeply moving testament to the power of story, the nature of belief, and the unrelenting pull of familial bonds.
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Great book club discussion book! Haunting not in a scary way, but make you think and did that really just happen kind of way. Four main characters, did not predict the rawness, the vulnerability nor the ending.
This book had me hooked from the right from the forward and the fortune teller. It’s a winding tale of four children and how different each was and each life became.
I decided to read it after many from my knitting group had been raving about it. I loved it. The story was so diverse and so well written and thought out. Also, I had the pleasure to meet Chloe Benjamin and found her to be a complete delight.
This is one I think I may read again.
This didn’t grab me right away and I didn’t think I liked it transitioning from character to character but it worked and the final sibling’s story brought the book to a satisfying conclusion.
Well written novel based on an interesting concept.
This is another book beautifully written with a very interesting plot. The idea of knowing your death date can be a very controversial topic and it is touched on differently through the four Gold children as they grow up and their given date approaches
The book chronicles our times through the story of four siblings who each take very different paths, and the ending isn’t at all what you expect it to be.
This author took a fascinating premise and created interesting characters. I wish she’d waited 20 years to write this. I think depth of story and emotional development of characters would have benefited.
Four siblings dare each other to go see a fortune teller. They have heard that this woman knows something—not about handsome strangers or sums of money but about when you will die. And so they do go visit the fortune teller and she gives them each a piece of information that drives this poignant and powerful novel.
One brother is told he will die young and he seems to take the idea of his inescapable death as a permission to throw himself into drugs and easy sex and he dies–much too young–of AIDS. But the awful knowledge that he would die young also fueled his determination to leave his restricted life at home and go find his tribe, to truly turn into himself before it was too late.
The other siblings lives also unfold with the idea of their death as the seed that drives them to lead lives in response to the possibility that the fortune teller really knew the future. Some are driven by fear, others by purpose. Do they determine their fate or merely succumb to it?
Each of us, in some way, is in the same boat. We know something about our family’s genes and social location, how our grandparents and parents lived and died. We pledge to be different, to be better, and yet we often find ourselves falling into some of the same traps, living our lives in response to a seed planted before we were able to recognize its power.
Chloe Benjamin weaves together a rich and satisfying mix of cultural history, of immigration, sexual politics, medicine, faith, and the power of art. Her gifts as a story teller are strong enough that even though we know, like the characters, when their end will come, we don’t know how or why, and we trust her to unravel those questions for us with compassion and honesty that feels, in the end, like a kind of hope.
Would you want to know the exact date of your death? Would it change the way you live? That premise, of this fabulously written book is as intriguing as the stories of Varya, Daniel, Klara, and Simon and how they choose to live their lives knowing their death date. I loved how the book was sectioned off to explore each character and examine their lives as they chose to live them, as they interacted with their family, and as they dealt with the knowledge of their impending death dates. Excellent character and plot development. I enjoyed getting to know these very individual and unique characters. This book really made me think of my own mortality and how I am living my life. Definitely one of the best books I’ve read this year!!
The characters in this book will stay with you a long time as you contemplate how you would live you life if you knew when you were going to die.
I loved this book, and haunting is a good description. Lingering. It was a great book club choice because it sure did foster discussion. I like her writing, her characters are full, and it was such an original premise. There was a lot going on; a lot of different lives with very different people; lives that intersected and Ms. Benjamin worked it all masterfully.
thought provoking story, does knowing when you will die change your life? is it fate or self-fulfilling prophecy?
Varya at thirteen is the eldest. Daniel is eleven, Klara is nine, and Simon is the youngest at seven. Daniel is leading the way. They come totheir father’s tailor shop but continue on to an old apartment building. They seek a woman who tells fortunes. She can even tell you the day you will die.
Each child must go into the woman’s apartment alone. Each child leaves altered, never to be the same.
Klara is the first to enter the fortune teller’s apartment. Next came Daniel, then Simon, and last of all Varya. “What if I change,” Varya asks, upset by what she learns. “Then you’d be special. ‘Cause most people don’t.”
In The Immortalists, Chloe Benjamin offers readers a book with big ideas that also reads like butter, an addictive story that lures one on into deeper waters. Each sibling’s history is revealed with its impact upon the others. Are the choices they make a reflection of what they believe will come?
Simon and Klara are the risk-takers who leave home for San Francisco. Simon embraces an open life as a gay man, becoming a dancer in a gay club. Klara is obsessed with their grandmother, a performer whose specialty was hanging suspended in midair from a rope which she held in her teeth. Klara pursues magic and performance, imitating her grandmother’s famous act.
Daniel and Varya take no risks. Daniel leads a solid life as a military doctor and family man. Varya becomes a researcher in longevity, struggling with obsessive disorder, especially about health.
In her struggle to overcome her losses and fears, Varya learns that the power of words can change the past, and the future, and the present.
This book is going to make a big splash.
I will warn that Simon’s story, the first to be revealed, includes descriptions of gay sex and the pre-AIDS San Francisco gay scene. Varya’s story includes lab animal testing; Benjamin’s research into animal testing moved her and she offers a link to the North American Primate Sanctuary Alliance.
I received a free book in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.
Odd, predictable and unfulfilling.
unusual and thought provoking
This was a powerful story, which starts off in NYC in 1969, the Gold children, Varya 13, Daniel 11, Klara 9 and Simon 7, have heard from people about a traveling psychic who can predict the day of your death, and they all sneak out to see if they can find her.
A story of an interesting family all so diverse in their wants in life and how they end up living their lives.
As the children grow they move to different places to live, and pursue their passions. Simon, moves to live a life no one knew about and studies dance.
His sister Karla has always wanted to be a magician, Daniel becomes a Doctor and Varya, a longevity specialist. Wherever they are, they always have on their minds, what they were told by the psychic.
This book was one that was hard to put down, as I became invested in each of their lives. It was also one that kept me a bit on edge, thinking about what it would be like to have the information they did. Would you believe it as destiny or would you think it was just the ramblings of an old woman, and how would your actions play into it.
This is a book well worth reading, and which will make you think about life.
I would like to thank NetGalley and PENGUIN GROUP Putnam for the ARC of this book.