Chloe Benjamin, Maggie Hoffman (Narrator): The Immortalists (AudiobookFormat, Penguin Audiobooks)
Audiobook
Published by Penguin Audiobooks.
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 …
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.
dnf
I haven't picked this back up since I started it. I think I made it like 15% of the way through. I could just tell it wasn't for me.
Are our lives controlled by fate or by the choices we make? What if it’s both, and neither can be separated from the other? This novel explores those questions in an entertaining way, with realistic characters who each had a story that stood on its own.
I read this earlier this year and somehow didn't mark it complete. It starts out strong - with the just the right premise to make my spine tingle with the hint of magic. But then it was just all right. Perhaps if it hadn't hit all the right notes in the first chapter, I would've had lower expectations and ironically thought more highly of it. Alas, I was disappointed.
