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ETERNAL LIFE

Dara Horn

What would it really mean to live forever?
Rachel is a woman with a problem: she can't die. Her recent troubles - widowhood, a failing business, an unemployed middle-aged son - are only the latest in a litany spanning dozens of countries, scores of marriages, and hundreds of children. In the 2,000 years since she made a spiritual bargain to save the life of her first son back in Roman-occupied Jerusalem, she's tried everything to free herself, and only one other person in the world understands: a man she once loved passionately, who has been stalking her through the centuries, convinced they belong together forever. But as the twenty-first century begins and her children and grandchildren - consumed with immortality in their own ways, from the frontiers of digital currency to genetic engineering - develop new technologies that could change her fate and theirs, Rachel knows she must find a way out. Gripping, hilarious, and profoundly moving, Eternal Life celebrates the bonds between generations, the power of faith, the purpose of death, and the reasons for being alive. Dara Horn, the author of the novels All Other Nights, The World to Come, and In the Image, and winner of two National Jewish Book Awards. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and four children.
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Published 2018-01-23 by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. - New York (USA)

Comments

An elegant musing on sacredness, history and purpose that is, at the same time, a deliciously romantic, highly suspenseful page-turner.

A fresh exploration of memory and the future... Poignant and thoughtful.

In Eternal Life, the familiar account of the joys and sorrows of motherhood turns strange and mythical. Wisdom literature is a rare thing, and even rarer when it arrives, as it does here, in a story so passionate and playful.

The chilling pathos of Dara Horn'sEternal Lifeis bound to turn every mortal reader into a philosopher of cosmic joy.

One strand of Horn's wondrously complex A Guide for the Perplexed (2013) concerned the efforts of a brilliant software designer to create a program that would allow its users to record every element of their lives and, thus, to keep the past alive, at least digitally. Now, in her latest novel, she again explores this notion of keeping the past alive but from an altogether new perspective: eternal life.

Funny and compassionate.

Eternal Lifetakes the psychological novel to places I've never seen before... Riveting, startling, hilarious, and sadI've never read anything like it.

Both heady time travel and a thoughtful meditation on the meaning of life; highly recommended.