Order Eternal Life
Rachel’s current troubles―a middle-aged son mining digital currency in her basement, a scientist granddaughter trying to peek into her genes―are only the latest in a litany spanning dozens of countries, scores of marriages, hundreds of children, and 2,000 years, going back to Roman-occupied Jerusalem. Only one person shares her immortality: an illicit lover who pursues her through the ages. But when her children develop technologies that could change her fate, Rachel must find a way out. From ancient religion to the scientific frontier, Dara Horn pits our efforts to make life last against the deeper challenge of making life worth living.
“I have been in love with Horn’s work since her first gorgeous novel, In the Image.… [Eternal Life] shimmers with Horn’s signature blend of tragedy and spirituality.”
“Riveting, startling, hilarious, and sad―I’ve never read anything like it.”
— Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot
“As a philosophical novel, Eternal Life asks the most fundamental of questions: What makes life meaningful? Is its traditional arc, from birth through family formation to death, necessary? Is it a blessing that we insufficiently appreciate?”
— Julia M. Klein, Forward
“The chilling pathos of Dara Horn’s Eternal Life is bound to turn every mortal reader into a philosopher of cosmic joy.”
— Cynthia Ozick, author of Foreign Bodies
“A mature, wry, uniquely female take on the problem of immortality.”
— Chelsea Leu, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Passionate, playful, and poignant.”
— Parade
“Masterful page-turner…Eternal Life is at its core a serious meditation on the meaning of life and purpose of death.”
— Renee Ghert-Zand, Times of Israel
“An elegant musing on sacredness, history and purpose that is, at the same time, a deliciously romantic, highly suspenseful page-turner.”
— Geraldine Brooks, author of The Secret Chord
“Horn does not hedge her bets, whipping up a Jewish telenovela of ancient-world drama and present-day complications. It’ll put you off immortality for good.”
— Marion Winik, Newsday
“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.”
— Joshua Ferris, author of The Dinner Party
“The question at the heart of this wise and appealing novel is finally not how Rachel finds meaning in her eternal life. It is how we, despite our portions of sorrow, tedium and disaster, persist in finding meaning in ours.”
— Joshua Max Feldman, New York Times Book Review
“Rachel speaks with the wisdom of the ancients when she observes that immortality offers no consolation for the death of others. ‘Not dying doesn’t make it better,’ she says of all that sorrow. ‘It only makes it take longer.’”
— Sam Sachs, Wall Street Journal
