The search for immortality

From the acclaimed author of Straw Dogs and Black Mass, the implications of John Gray's The Search for Mortality will haunt readers for the rest of their lives—and perhaps beyond.

The obsession with the nature of death and humanity's various attempts to explain and even prove the existence of life after death are the themes of this book. The refusal to believe that death is the end of everything and to insist on our immortality resulted in various experiments and ideologies that, as Gray explains, persist to this day.

Here, Gray presents two major examples of this: the belief of a group of Edwardian intellectuals that there was a form of life after death (accessed by mediums and automatic writing) and the certainty that the science of communism in the new USSR could reshape the planet, reinventing human beings and freeing them from death—and, in the process, resurrecting revolutionary leaders.

The author interweaves these cases with extraordinary stories of philosophers, politicians, spiritualists, embalmers, mad inventors, passionate physicists, spy journalists, and mass murderers, all driven by a modern worldview that science would make humanity invincible.

The Quest for Mortality offers a brilliant and frightening vision of a world beginning to grapple with man's solitary place in the universe, and a revealing story of our delirious quest for immortality.