A chem­istry stu­dent falls for his teacher and uncov­ers a cen­turies-old quest for the elixir of life.

The morn­ing after the death of his first love, Con­rad Aybinder receives a bequest. Sam­my Tam­pari was Conrad’s lover. He was his teacher. And, it turns out, he was not just a chemist, but an alchemist, search­ing for a myth­ic elixir of life. Sammy’s death was sud­den, yet he some­how man­aged to leave twen­ty years’ worth of his note­books and a stor­age lock­er full of expen­sive, some­times baf­fling equip­ment in the hands of his star stu­dent. The note­books con­tain cryp­tic ​“recipes,” but no instruc­tions; they tell his life sto­ry, but only hint at what might have caused his death. And Sammy’s research is lit­tered with his favorite teach­ing ques­tion: What’s miss­ing?

As Con­rad pieces togeth­er the solu­tion, he finds he is not the only one to sus­pect that Sam­my suc­ceed­ed in his quest. And if he wants to save his father from a mys­te­ri­ous ill­ness, Con­rad will have to make some very dif­fi­cult choices.

A globe-trot­ting, cen­tu­ry-span­ning adven­ture sto­ry, Jake Wolff’s The His­to­ry of Liv­ing For­ev­er takes us from Maine to Roma­nia to East­er Island and intro­duces a cast of unfor­get­table characters―drug king­pins, Big Phar­ma flunkies, cen­te­nar­i­ans, boy genius­es, and even a group of immor­tal­ists mas­querad­ing as coin col­lec­tors. It takes us deep into the mys­ter­ies of life―from first love to first heart­break, from the long pall of grief to the irrec­on­cil­able lone­li­ness of depres­sion to the pos­si­bil­i­ty of med­ical mir­a­cles, from com­ing of age to com­ing out. Hilar­i­ous, haunt­ing, heart-bust­ing, life-affirm­ing, it asks each of us one of life’s essen­tial ques­tions: How far would you go for some­one you love?