The concept is intriguing, irresistible – if you knew the date of your date, how would that affect the rest of your life? Would you live it with no fear, doing everything you ever wanted to do, or would it be like a sword constantly hanging over your head, limiting your every move?
That’s the premise of this fascinating novel, and it makes for an equally fascinating read.
The story is centred on four siblings, the Gold children, who visit a psychic in 1969, who predicts when each will die. They tell no one of the date that is each revealed to each, including among themselves. But the date clearly informs how each live their lives into adulthood, and we follow them through their separate, sometimes strange journeys in sections that deal with each sibling separately.
There’s the shy bookish Varya, gay Simon who finds love and acceptance in 1980s San Francisco, Klara who becomes a musician, and Daniel who becomes a doctor. Both Simon and Klara’s sories were particularly vivid, fantastical and well imagined, and I enjoyed these sections. Less space is given to the stories of Daniel and then Varya. It is also a story of immigration – and how that has affected the trajectory of their parents’ lives. Is it really possible to predict the future – and is that future bound up in character only? The fortunte teller says early on, “Your character. Ever heard of Heraclitus?”
Varya shakes her head.
“Greek philosopher. Character is fate— that’s what he said. They’re bound up, those two, like brothers and sisters. You wanna know the future?” She points at Varya with her free hand. “Look in the mirror.”
And if you think you know the date you’ll die, do you unconsciously make that future happen? “But Varya and her siblings had choices, and the luxury of self-examination. They wanted to measure time, to plot and control it. In their pursuit of the future, though, they only drew closer to the fortune teller’s prophecies.”
At times the novel reads like a mystery as we follow the siblings into their lives – and their futures are revealed to us. A compelling, interesting read – which throws up a few questions about fate, and pre-destiny along the way.

An interesting novel about a family who all discover their death dates from a psychic as teenagers, and how this information affects them and their lives. A compelling read.

The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin introduces a compelling question: would you want to know when you will die? And how might that knowledge impact you choices and the way in which you live your life? I loved the concept, and I also loved how Benjamin examines it through the narrative of each sibling's life experiences as the navigate life after learning the date of their death when they were children. I especially liked Simon's story in the beginning of the book, but really, I enjoyed the book in general. In addition, I liked the language and the writing. I recommend it.

ould you want to know when you will die? It would give you a chance to live life to its fullest or could hang over you like a death sentence.

It's 1969 and the 4 young Gold siblings decide to chance it when a gypsy comes to town to find out when their expiration dates are up.

These prophecies dictate how their lives unfold because as much as they don't want to believe, their own self fulfilling prophecies will lead them down a path: Simon, the youngest, lives his life recklessly trying to fulfill his dreams at the cost of losing his family; Klara, the magician, thinks she is invincible of death and will outlive it, but the memory of the prophecy overshadows hers life and she takes up alcohol as a way of coping. Can she magically will away her time?Daniel, the doctor, believes in science rather than the prophecies of a witch. But when his d day comes, does the science prove truth over the reality of the words spoken to him as a young boy? And Varya, the eldest who is to live the longest. She dedicates her life to studying primates and their longevity; opting for science rather than the irrational. But longevity doesn't equate to living. All siblings influenced by the psychic's premonitions -
True or false they padded the paths each child followed. The tragedies that may have been avoided.

Themes of religion, sibling rivalry, family and regrets, abound in this exemplary story that spans 3 centuries. And a totally cool cover makes this a 5⭐️ read.

The book opens in 1969 on New York's Lower East Side. Four young siblings -- I mean kids -- go to visit a fortune teller who is rumored to be able to tell you the date of your death. What they learn from the fortuneteller will color their lives. I liked the structure of this book, with the POV staggered among the siblings. Would be a good choice for book groups. 3 1/2 stars.

I was so excited to read this book. Long story, short - it was a letdown. This is a piece of literary fiction about four siblings who, in 1969, go to see a traveling psychic who is rumored to be able to tell them the date they will die. The book spans the next several decades, following their lives as they each have their dates looming over them. The book focuses on the relationship between the siblings, which was the major drawing point for me. I love reading about families and especially the dynamic between siblings, but in this particular case, it fell short. I can think of a dozen other books that I'd prefer to read that focus on this topic. Sadly, this one did not live up to all the hype. *ARC provided by the publisher in exchange for my honest review.

Each sibling had a good story, but the whole thing was so tragic. Would they have led different lives if they hadn't seen the fortune teller at such a young, impressionable age?

This book is stunning! Where do I begin? The concept and plot are flawless, the characters were perfectly written, and the book reads beautifully. I read the novel in a single sitting because I couldn't stop turning the pages. It is a thoughtful look at life, family, and mortality. I wished it could have been longer because I would have easily read a full book of each character's life. Truly, a masterpiece. Definitely pick this book up!!

A sweeping novel of love, family, and drama and history.

It's 1969 and the Gold children are living in the stifling Lower East Side of New York. When they learn that a traveling psychic is in town they sneak out to learn their fate. Now, armed with the mystic's knowledge of the day each will die, Varya, Daniel, Klara, and Simon set out to shape their lives into what they will become.

The Immortalists delves into the connection between family members and seeks to answer the question of how you would live life if you were aware of the unknowable.

I found the birth of Ruby interesting because she hadn't been born when the other Gold children visited the psychic. I wanted to pay special attention to how the way she attempted to plan her life differed from her siblings, who had information about their ultimate fate. Some of which approached life with caution and others who threw caution to the wind.

The Immortalists is a wonderful book of what-ifs intertwined with family drama. An interesting book for the curious and adventurous at heart.

Wow...just WOW! What an amazing story, flawed but compelling characters, beautiful writing. TheI mmortalists will be a book that haunts me for a long, long time. It’s a page turner I couldn’t put down.I loved this book! I've recommended it to every reader I know. Can't wait to read more by Chloe Benjamin.

At it’s core, it’s a book about how to life your life: cautious, reckless, loving, spiteful… And it’s not something that exists in the book as polar opposites, either. The four Gold children each had a way to live, and to die, that becomes true to each one. I thought the sections on Simon and Varya were the strongest, each reflecting a very strong personality and view of the world, with compelling goals and, in Simon’s case especially, some poignant tragedy. 3.5 stars.

I really liked this book despite some of the sadder story lines. It was a great premise about what we might do if we knew the day we would die. Would we live large and race towards it or be more careful and try to outsmart fate? I liked the use of four narrators and the structure Benjamin chose.

At last year's Book Expo Editors' Book Buzz, six books were presented as books to look forward to in 2017/2018. Ayobami Adabeyo's Stay With Me was one presented and it was the most compelling book I read in 2017. (The complete list is here.)



A.J. Finn's The Woman in the Window was also on that list and it shot to the top of the bestseller list when it published last week. (My review is here.)



A third book at that presentation was Chloe Benjamin's novel The Immortalists. It asks the question "if you knew the exact date of your death, how would you live your life?" Four young siblings find out that a psychic lives near them, and for a price she will tell you the date of your death.



The year is 1969, and the country is in turmoil as Varya, Daniel, Klara and Simon pay her a visit and one by one learn of their fateful date. The three oldest share their dates with each other, but the youngest, Simon, keeps his information to himself.



Years later Daniel is at college studying to be a doctor, and Varya is also away at school with dreams of a medical career when a family tragedy brings them home. Klara has always been the flighty one, and Simon has been the dependable one, the one who is being groomed to take over the family tailoring business.



Each sibling gets to narrate their own story. Simon chafes at his destiny of being trapped in the family business. When Klara decides to go west to San Francisco to become a magician, she convinces Simon to come with her, and that is where his story begins.



Simon finds his true self among the San Francisco scene and it was his story that moved me the most. His search for his authentic identity and for love is so emotional, it draws the reader in.



Klara's dreams take longer to come true. She works dead-end jobs while she perfects her magician craft. Her story and Simon's intersect for many years, until Klara's struggle to make it as a magician and her own love life take her on the road.



Klara's story has a bit of a mystical touch to it, and I found the denouement of her story the most troubling.



Daniel gets to be a doctor. He works for the government as an army doctor, certifying young men as healthy for military duty. Could his career choice be a result of the psychic's words, an attempt to influence someone's else's fate?



Varya stayed at home to care for their mother, giving up her dreams of being a doctor. She is resentful that Simon escaped while she carried the burden for all of her siblings.



She eventually ends up working in medical research, working with research animals to discover why some people live longer than others.



All of the Gold children's lives as adults seemed to be influenced by what the psychic told them. Their mother said something that is prescient of the future:

"Nobody picks their life, I sure didn't." Gertie laughs, a scrape. "Here's what happens: you make choices and then they make choices. Your choices make choices."

The Gold children made choices, some based on their experience with the psychic. Did her predictions make choices for them?



After reading the engrossing, brilliant The Immortalists, you can't help but ask the question of yourself- if you knew the date you were going to die, how would you live your life? You'll be pondering that long after the book ends, and isn't that the sign of the good book- one that makes you think?



So far, the Editors' Book Buzz has been three for three; can they extend the streak? My post about the Book Expo Editors' Book Buzz can be found here.

If you knew the day you were going to die, how differently would you live your life? Does your belief or lack of belief in that piece of information determine your choices? These are the questions #TheImmortalists by Chloe Benjamin grapples with. A memorable book that leaves me with the firm belief that I do not ever wish to pursue the knowledge given to these children. True or not, believed or not, it changes lives. Words matter, and thoughts matter.

Read my complete review at http://www.memoriesfrombooks.com/2018/03/the-immortalists.html

Reviewed for #NetGalley

I really enjoyed this book. I liked that each character in the book had their own chapters. The 4 Gold children take it upon to themselves to visit with a fortune teller who tells them the exact date of the their deaths. How each of them deals with this information is basically what this book is about. One lives carelessly and recklessly, while another sibling tries to find a way to perhaps live forever.. The book started to lose steam for me on the last character's Varya's storyline, .I didn't understand her rejection of Luke. nor why she didn't have a closer relationship with her siblings.. Other than that one storyline ,I thought the rest of the book was very good and interesting.

I have been hearing about this book for MONTHS and the praise has been everywhere. This book is pretty straightforward … four siblings visit a fortune teller and she tells them the exact date of each of their deaths. The rest of the book reveals the lives of each sibling and how knowing the exact date of their deaths impacts them. I found the novel to be a great way to explore the idea of fate and whether or not knowing when our life will end has an impact on how we live that life. My husband was told by a fortune teller how old he’d be when he died and he’s convinced that she was right after she shared other things that there is no way she could have known. I’m not sure I buy into that but it’s been interesting to see how he’s reacted to that information. Reading this book was really enlightening. It made me think about my feelings about fate and creating your own life and/or death. I didn’t love this one nearly as much as some of my reader friends. But, I did enjoy it and I’m glad I read it. I really enjoyed learning more about each of the siblings and their journeys. I definitely recommend it and think it might make a great book club book as it could bring up some interesting conversations about life and death.

A lot of people will like this book. I am not one of them. It was written well, but it was so boring to me. A few times I got frustrated with myself that I was still reading it. That said, I'm glad I finished it because Vasrya's section was the best part of the book for me.

The novel The Immortalists (2017) seems to be cursed by the very premise it seeks to explore: the interplay between chance and destiny is not an easy subject to tackle. Benjamin's somewhat tamed approach to it, however, makes it sound like a bad omen. Sadly, by the end of the book, this prophecy will have proved to be a self-fulfilling one.

The book is a decades-spanning story of a Jewish immigrant family. It revolves around the four Gold siblings — Varya, Daniel, Klara and Simon. When the story begins, they are respectively 13, 11, 9 and 7 years old. It is the Summer of 1969 on New York’s Lower East Side, and the Gold children are bored and restless. When they overhear a rumour about a psychic on Hester Street who can predict their exact dates of death, they promptly make their way to her apartment. The mysterious fortune-teller then tells each child, separately, the date of his or her death.

From this moment on, the Gold siblings undergo a sharp transformation: as in a fall from grace, they cannot go back to what they were before having eaten this forbidden fruit – the knowledge of the day they will die. The book then jumps ahead, from New York to San Francisco and back, in four individual sections, from the late 70’s to 2010. Intertwined with four decades of American history, we follow the Gold siblings’ diverging paths into adulthood.

In the late ’70s, 16-year-old Simon, knowing he has little time to spare, drops out of high school and runs off to San Francisco, where he comes out as gay, trains with a ballet group, and becomes a dancer in a nightclub. Doomed to die young by the fortune-teller, Simon is reckless in his pursue of pleasure. Each of his choices seems to be magnified by the knowledge of his date of death. As AIDS is spreading among his acquaintances, we cannot help but share this knowledge with him.

Klara, Simon’s best friend and confidante, runs away with him to San Francisco and experiences everything first hand. Obsessed with illusionism (as “a different kind of knowledge, an expanded sense of possibility”), she trains herself to be a stage magician and becomes a professional illusionist dubbed The Immortalist. Gradually drowning in alcohol and depression, Klara increasingly blurs illusion and reality, until the point where she makes a tragic choice between both.

We then jump to 2006, when Daniel is a military medical doctor based in Kingston, NY. Although insisting he does not believe in the fortune-teller, he is still haunted by that day in 1969 – as well as by the deaths of Simon and Klara – “like a minuscule needle in his stomach, something he swallowed long ago and which floats, undetectable, except for moments when he moves a certain way and feels a prick.” Obsessed with revenge, he puts his own life in danger.

Finally, we come to Varya, the last of the Gold siblings. It’s 2010, and she has become a scientist, conducting a longevity study with rhesus monkeys. We soon learn that she suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder, and that she has a secret.

The novel’s core is the exploration of how each of the siblings reacts to the knowledge of his or her date of death: Simon’s recklessness; Klara’s unwillingness to give up her trust in magic; Daniel’s scepticism and thirst for revenge; and Varya’s longing for control. The Golds jump to their much-feared destiny at the precise moment they believe they are fleeing from it. In a way, all of them are disturbed by the knowledge of their death, as if it were a slow-spreading poison. As Varya puts it, “stories did have the power to change things: the past and the future, even the present”. The Golds’ belief in the psychic’s premonition shapes every aspect of their lives. And, precisely because of that, their stories are flattened out. We are left no room for ambiguity.

I feel the author set herself to explore the different ways the siblings were altered by this forbidden knowledge; I don’t think, though, that she has succeeded. In the surface, each of the Golds seems to have reacted differently; however, everything they do boils down to one same conclusion: their lives, no matter what direction they take, are laid out as self-fulfilling prophecies, forever cursed by the knowledge bestowed upon them by the fortune-teller.

While Simon and Klara’s stories are more layered and complex, I had a feeling the author didn’t quite know where to take Daniel and Varya. Their sections are rushed through, and forced. As she tries to make her point clear to the reader, it loses its lustre, its nuance. The second half of the book reads as if she were explaining a trick, instead of, you know, performing magic. The interplay between choice and chance is lost halfway through, as the author seems to have lost the control over her plot, precariously balancing it between predictable and highly improbable events, with nothing to hold the reader in-between. We are dragged to the end, as much as her characters are. As the Golds, we are left no margin for choice, no ambiguity, and no magic. The Immortalists cast their spell, but it is a short-lived one.

A fortune teller has come to town, four inquisitive kids who want to know when they will die visit her with all their savings. This is how the story begins. A silly visit, just innocent curiosity- but it stays with them all their life.
Klara and Simon move away from home, Daniel pursues medicine and Klara’s life shifts between taking care of her mother and devoting her life to research on life and ways to live longer. Each of the siblings chooses a way of life and pursues it. But somewhere, the constant knowledge of knowing exactly when they are going to die lives with them .
Simon embraces his sexuality, goes on to become a ballet dancer- a Simon much different to what he was when with his family. Klara has always been drawn to magic. She wants to become a magician like her grandmother- but bills and responsibilities get in the way. She ploughs on, and does become a magician after all. Daniel aims to become a doctor and becomes a doctor for the army. Varya aims to study and become successful, but the loss of her dear family members forces her to change her decision and come back to her mother. This does not stop her from pursuing her dream of going into research.
They are all different, bound together by the blood running in them. Each adopts a course of life they see fit. Were their choices influenced by their knowledge of their inevitable end? Or is that how life is? Are we truly responsible for the way life is, or are we just puppets in the hands of destiny. This book explores choices, decisions and life itself.
The first two parts of the book left me very irritated. I felt it was filled with immature choices, rash decisions and just lives led without much contemplation. However, isn’t that how youth is? The second and third parts were more mature and really brought the book together. I felt I did not enjoy the book as much; a few parts were dull maybe because they were just too plain and real. But overall, it was a book that made me think.