Ultimately, there are no straight-forward answers. The narrative is split into four sections, following each of the brothers and sisters in turn until their deaths (or in the case of the final sibling, the ‘death’ of an old life) – each individual considers the notion of fate versus self-fulfilling prophesy in their own way and then acts according to their nature. For the majority of the siblings, the knowledge of the date of their final day alive is a curse rather than a blessing, a heavy burden rather than a liberation. Whether the psychic is a true seer or a fraud is less important than how the predictions affect the lives of the Gold children. This is a character rather than a plot-driven work. The story then follows how this knowledge influences their lives for the next five decades but do they die on a particular date because of fate or because they – consciously or not – make life choices to fulfil this prediction?Īlthough the premise suggests magic-realism or fantasy elements, The Immortalists is literary fiction (although at one point it does digress into thriller territory). Chloe Benjamin’s novel The Immortalists opens in New York in 1969 where the Gold children – Varya, Daniel, Klara and Simon – seek out a mysterious woman who is said to have the ability to tell anyone the day of their death.
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