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A Brief History of Living Forever
On sale
28th March 2023
Price: £9.99
FROM THE AUTHOR OF SPACEMAN OF BOHEMIA, SOON TO BE A MAJOR NETFLIX FILM STARRING ADAM SANDLER AND CAREY MULLIGAN
‘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
Adéla, diagnosed with a terminal illness, leaves her Czech village for America to reunite with her daughter Tereza, now a scientist at a New York biotech company hellbent on curing mortality. Their reunion is short, and before Tereza can help her mother, Adéla dies and her remains disappear.
But Adéla’s spirit survives, restlessly watching over Tereza as she searches for the body on a journey that spans oceans and continents, through a world ravaged by corporate greed and political extremism. Witty and prescient, A Brief History of Living Forever is a vivid story of family connection prevailing in the face of societal collapse.
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
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Reviews
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
A thoroughly original story from a writer to watch
Inventive and heartfelt, this dystopian take on the immigrant experience and the American Dream packs a walloping punch
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
A dystopian romp with a tender centre . . . I didn't want it to end
Ingenious . . . With a perceptive satirical slant and sharp humour, Kalfar builds a plausibly terrifying world