New York, 1969. A rumor spreads in the Lower East Side about a mysterious fortune-teller who can predict the day of death. Four young Gold children, aged from seven to thirteen, decide to learn their future. When it’s Varя’s turn—the oldest— the fortune-teller looks at her palm and smiles: “With you everything will be fine, you’ll die in 2044.” Outside, Varya is waiting for her grim brothers and sister. Over the following decades, the prophecies begin to come true. The children’s fates will be strange and twisted.
Simon Gold runs away to San Francisco, where he throws himself headlong into bohemian life. Clara, after meeting the fortune-teller, will sink deeper and deeper into dreams each year, wanting to cross the line between fantasy and reality. Daniel becomes a military doctor and lives steadily—until that very fate intervenes. Varya devotes herself to studying the problem of immortality, balancing between science and fiction. A novel of astonishing depth about the connection between inevitability and freedom of choice, about the intertwining of illusion and reality, about the power of family bonds—and the forces that tear them apart.