Review ~ The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin

Tinder

8 March 2018

My thanks to the publishers for my copy of this book

I've never been fond of fortune telling. That people should deliberately seek out the knowledge of what is to come, always feels to me, a bit like tempting fate, but for the Gold siblings the idea of finding out about their future is pretty much all they can think about when they enter the dirty tenement building in New York's Lower East Side. When they are given a momentous piece of information, the repercussions reverberate and change the course of their lives forever.

The novel is nicely divided into sections so that each of the siblings have the chance to tell their own story and yet, it is the pull of their shared connection as a family which helps to give the story its momentum. I enjoyed getting to know the finer points of their lives and of course, wondered just how everything would play out in the finer context of them knowing what they know. I'm being deliberately vague about what they find out from the fortune teller in 1969, although what they are told comes very quickly at the start of the novel !

The Immortalists is one of those satisfying stories which pulls you in slowly and, in soft and subtle ways, makes you stop and consider the consequences of what happens when you simply know too much...

About the Author

Chloe Benjamin is the author of THE IMMORTALISTS, a New York Times Bestseller, #1 Indie Next Pick for January 2018, Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection, #1 Library Reads pick, and Amazon Best Book of the Month.

Her first novel, THE ANATOMY OF DREAMS (Atria, 2014), received the Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award and was longlisted for the 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize.

Her novels have been translated into over twenty-three languages. A graduate of Vassar College and the M.F.A. in fiction at the University of Wisconsin, Chloe lives with her husband in Madison, WI

Twitter @chloekbenjamin #The Immortalists