A Brief History of Living Forever (AJ)

An audacious novel set in near-future America, from the critically acclaimed author of SPACEMAN OF BOHEMIA.

When Adéla discovers she has a terminal illness, her thoughts turn to Tereza, the child she gave up at birth. Leaving behind her family in their native Czech village, Adéla flies to the United States to find her long-lost daughter before it is too late.

Raised in America and living in a fractured New York City, Tereza is working for two suspicious biotech moguls hellbent on immortality. But before Tereza can imagine a cure for Adéla, her mother dies and her body disappears.

Narrated by Adéla's restless spirit, the novel blends an immigrant mother's heart-breaking journey through Reagan's American dream with her children's quest to reclaim her in the near future. By turns insightful, poignant and satirical, A Brief History of Living Forever deftly navigates grief and hope in a high-wire act of storytelling.

Review
Ambitious, exciting . . . Kalfar knows his way around a sentence. By turns aphoristic and lyrical, with touches of Don DeLillo, Kalfar's prose contains plenty of stylish wisdom . . . Mixing fantasy, satire, horror and metaphysics, A Brief History has many stories to tell. But the pulse animating each of them is the shock of sudden loss - of jobs, of loved ones, of a world you thought you knew -- Frank Lawton ― Daily Telegraph

Jaroslav Kalfar's A Brief History of Living Forever is a book from the future, here to deliver an urgent story about the present. Extending the speculative logics of Franz Kafka's Amerika and working in the dreamlike, psychic registers of Philip K. Dick's Ubik, Kalfar presents an entrancing, lucid, and incisive vision of immortality that starts and ends with the self-this is a brilliant, disorienting, and endlessly fascinating read -- Tom Lin, author of the Carnegie Medal winner The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu

Inventive and heartfelt, this dystopian take on the immigrant experience and the American Dream packs a walloping punch ― Esquire

Ingenious . . . With a perceptive satirical slant and sharp humour, Kalfar builds a plausibly terrifying world ― Publishers Weekly

A thoroughly original story from a writer to watch ― LitHub