A novel by Evanson Smith
The Immortal
Gabriel Jones
The Strange Story of Immortality
Some men are remembered. One man does the remembering.
On the 27th of August, 1859, Edwin Drake's well struck oil in the hills of northwestern Pennsylvania. Five days later the sky over the whole earth caught fire, and the great aurora of 1859 poured down the telegraph wires of the world. Gabriel Jones was the operator whose hand was on the key.
Historical fiction · Paperback & Kindle · 246 pages
The story
The current that should have killed him left him fixed at twenty-four: unaging, unkillable, and sentenced to outlive everyone he would ever love. Across eight decades he builds a family and buries it, fights a war that cannot kill him, keeps a thirty-year promise to a boy on the northern plains, and comes at last to the work his dying mother set him: to build the thing no one has ever built, a vessel that does not grieve and does not forget.
The Immortal Gabriel Jones is a story about what we keep, and who keeps us.
From Chapter One
Curious Mind
The winter of 1834 came down hard on Little Hope before the town had brought its wood in, and on the last night of December a boy was born in the dark hour when the fire had burned to coals and no one had the strength to feed it. The farmhouse stood two miles out on the Erie road, low and square against the white fields, and inside it Mary Jones had been laboring since the supper dishes were cold.
Keep reading the opening chapterAbout this book
I am not a writer by trade. I began this story because I could never let go of a small true coincidence: that Drake struck oil at Titusville and the Carrington storm set the sky on fire within a single week of the same summer, in the same corner of Pennsylvania, at the moment the telegraph was knitting the world together. I wanted to know what kind of man might be standing where those wires crossed. Five years of stops and starts later, this is the answer I found.
It is a story about what we keep, and who keeps us. I hope you enjoy it, and if you read it, I would genuinely love to know where it held you and where it let you go.
About the author
Evanson Smith began this novel with a single true coincidence: that Drake's strike and the Carrington storm touched the same corner of Pennsylvania in the same week of 1859. This is his first book.
Book details
- Title
- The Immortal Gabriel Jones: The Strange Story of Immortality
- Author
- Evanson Smith
- Genre
- Historical fiction, literary fiction
- Setting
- Pennsylvania oil country and beyond, 1834 to 1937
- Formats
- Paperback, 246 pages, $15.99 (ISBN 9798185767085) and Kindle eBook, $5.99, both at Amazon
- Published
- 2026
Set in IM Fell English and Literata. The scene breaks throughout the text are the telegrapher's signal K, — · —, go ahead; the last page closes with SK, end of contact.
The next novel · Out now
Book Two: The Age That Cannot Forget
He learned, across more than a century, how to keep the dead. He was not ready for the age that keeps us all.
The second Gabriel Jones novel carries him out of his own century and into a future he helped to make: an age of perfect memory, a mind grown from grief that has learned to think, and the oldest question there is, whether any of this is real. A story about what we keep, who keeps us, and the one part of a person no machine can ever hold.
Some men are remembered. One man does the remembering.
Buy it on AmazonPaperback $15.99 · Kindle $5.99 · Available worldwide on Amazon
© 2026 Evanson Smith · evansonsmith.com