“The Immortalists” by Chloe Benjamin

Let’s begin here: four young siblings in 1969’s Manhattan, snuck away to find the mysterious fortune teller they’ve heard whispers of, who can prophecy the date of your death. So spins the sweeping tale of the four Gold children as they move through their lives and to their deaths haunted by the fortune teller’s prophecy. The youngest child, Simon, abandons high school following the shocking death of his father and absconds to the mecca of 1980’s San Francisco where he searches for love. Next oldest, Klara, shuffles off societal expectations as she chases her dream of being a magician. Blending the liminal spaces between life and death, real and unreal, she wonders if death really ends the relationship with the beloved and if she can escape her own death to be reunited with those she misses most. Oldest brother, Daniel, seeks structure and security as a military doctor in post-911 America but following a suspension, he becomes obsessed with finding the fortune teller who so impacted his family. Are her prophecy’s a scam or a portal? Eldest, Varya, is our final chapter of this family saga. Saddled with untreated OCD, she has dedicated her life to longevity research, determined to outsmart and outrun the death that has haunted her family since the prophecy. But is there any point to avoiding death if you aren’t fully living?

There is nothing subtle about the themes of death and grief in this book of popular fiction. From the first pages until the last, you’ll be considering your own mortality and your relationship with it. Even now, I’m wondering if I’d want to know the date of my death, if that knowledge would push me to do the thing, seek the dream, live more intensely or if it’d slowly chip away at the mystery which grounds me, the magic of not knowing, the grace of liminality. Pick up this majestic work, fall into the lives of the Gold siblings as you skip across America from the Lower East Side to San Francisco’s Haight-Asbury with a few stops in Vegas as you span five decades of the sweeping story of family, love, death, grief, and of course, magic.