What if you had the chance to remain at your exact age for the next thirty years? What if you could extend your life potentially forever?
Would you have a new lease on life, literally, and do the things you never thought you'd have time to do?
Would you be more or less ambitious because you knew time was on your side?
Would 'growing old together' with the person you love still mean something?
It's 2023 and the NHS is on the verge of being privatized. As a result, Yareta, a drug that could hold the key to immortality, is poised to enter the global market. The wonder drug's charismatic creator, Frank Walker (73 years old going on 43), believes it has the potential to be a silver bullet for humanity and the world over. By extending one's life by thirty years and possibly longer, Yareta would give every individual the chance to unlock their true potential and, as a social good, ease national health services around the world by delaying the onset of old age. It would even give us the chance to tackle the climate crisis-right?
With its global sensibility and intersecting cast of unforgettable characters, WHO WANTS TO LIVE FOREVER is poses compelling questions about what it means to live a good, fulfilled life, even as it offers scathing critiques of the socioeconomic disparity plaguing our global healthcare systems. With a masterful voice and worldbuilding, this is novel is both contemporary and timeless in its universal concerns, full of nuance and zeitgeisty, chewy ideas.