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The Immortalists

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The Immortalists

January 2018

I read THE IMMORTALISTS in the spring of 2017 as I was interviewing Chloe Benjamin for the Author Buzz panel at BookExpo, and have looked forward to sharing it with readers since then. The central question from this book has stayed with me: Would I want to know the date of my death?

In the novel, four Gold siblings go to visit a traveling psychic on the Lower East Side of New York in the summer of 1969. It’s a lark of a trip for these four adolescents as it has been rumored that this woman can predict the day a person will die. Each child meets with her individually and hears his or her death date; only one is revealed to readers early in the story.

Life moves on over the next five decades, with the fates coming into play as they were told for Simon, Klara, Daniel and Varya. They tumble in and out of each other’s lives, moving around the country, but their afternoon together decades ago has united these siblings with a bond. As death comes to the first sibling, as predicted, there is a moment when they begin to feel that the psychic was telling the truth.

Readers are brought along with them on this journey and are challenged to think. Are their individual life choices influenced by what they learned? Was this really a prophecy? The topic of knowing the date of your death will tug at you --- and I dare say you will ask people if they would want to know for many days after you read it. I vacillate in how I feel. Asking this question of friends and family since I read the book has brought some very interesting conversations to the table. Book clubs, take it away!

The Immortalists
by Chloe Benjamin

  • Publication Date: February 5, 2019
  • Genres: Fiction
  • Paperback: 368 pages
  • Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons
  • ISBN-10: 073521509X
  • ISBN-13: 9780735215092