Description

‘Ambitious, exciting . . . touches of Don DeLillo’ Daily Telegraph

‘A Kurt Vonnegut-like satirical touch’ New York Times

‘Inventive and heartfelt . . . packs a walloping punch’ Esquire

When Adela 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, Adela 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 Adela, her mother dies and her body disappears.

Narrated by Adela’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.

Praise for SPACEMAN OF BOHEMIA:

‘Funny, human and oddly down-to-earth’ Guardian

‘A superb debut’ Literary Review

‘Booming with vitality and originality’ New York Times

Publisher Review

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