The end of the year is upon us, which means that between the shopping, cooking, decorating, and parties, we’re also hustling to get through that “to read” stack of books sitting tauntingly by our bedside. Yet even as we page through the backlog of delayed beach reads and best of the year that squeaked in under the wire, our minds are also turning toward the exciting new stories heading our way in the new year. Here, a selection of some of the lit we’re adding to our 2018 list.
Is there such a thing as knowing too much? That’s the question four siblings have to grapple with in Benjamin’s inventive second novel, which opens with a psychic telling the Gold children the precise dates of their deaths in 1969 New York. The tale continues into their disparate adulthoods—happily married or resignedly alone, tightly regimented or unabashedly free-spirited, selfish or self-proclaiming selflessness—as the choices they’ve made with the ticking clock of mortality in mind raise quandaries about predetermination and the nature of self-fulfilling prophesies.
The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin, £16.99, amazon.com on January 9.
