(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.
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