Why else would anyone play at permanence - fall in love, have children, buy a house - in the face of all the evidence there’s no such thing?” 21, 2044 - and its starkness on the page sent a small shudder through this reader.) With an endpoint so clearly specified, it’s easy to slip into nihilism: “Most adults claim not to believe in magic, but Klara knows better. (We learn Varya’s prediction early on - Jan. Naming the precise day of one’s death does something funny to the characters, though: It actually magnifies their fear and uncertainty. Then there’s Daniel, a military doctor who stayed close to their mother, Gertie, and Varya, the eldest, who conducts research on monkeys at an anti-aging institute. Klara, a magician who works her way up to her own Vegas show, is next. Simon, the youngest, is the first to go at 20, dying of AIDS in 1982 after a few uninhibited years as a gay man in the Castro. (Indeed, “The Immortalists” TV rights have already been acquired by production studio the Jackal Group.) After the visit to the fortune-teller, the book breaks into four sections, each beginning with a sibling coping with another family member’s death and most ending with that sibling hurtling toward their own - in exactly the order and time the woman on Hester Street predicted. So much of the book’s plot follows from that portentous set-up by necessity that its progress can feel dutiful, almost programmatic. It’s a premise that carries the whiff of a thought experiment or a question on a personality quiz: Would you want to know the date of your death? In 1969, the four Gold siblings, Varya, Klara, Simon and Daniel, steal away to Hester Street in New York, where a fortune teller tells each of them the day they’ll die. But Chloe Benjamin’s second novel, “The Immortalists,” imagines what happens when that truth moves from hazy inevitability to pressing reality. Death comes for us all, we know that - in theory.

The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin