58 pages • 1-hour read
The Impossible Fortune
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of physical abuse and death.
The Long-Term Effects of Grief
Across the Thursday Murder Club series, all four of the central protagonists have lost spouses, partners, and close friends as they’ve grown older, foregrounding the long-term effects of grief as a central concern of the series. In The Impossible Fortune, Osman chronicles Elizabeth’s journey back to herself a year after her husband’s death. Through the investigation into Nick’s disappearance and Holly’s death, Elizabeth starts to “feel” again, emotionally. Her appetite returns, and she begins to act more like her old self, even though her loss has irrevocably changed her. Osman underscores Elizabeth’s arc with Joyce and Joanna’s experiences navigating Joanna’s wedding without Joyce’s husband, Gerry, highlighting the ways major life events exacerbate grief.
Elizabeth’s struggle to describe her grief mirrors her attempts to grapple with and survive it. In the wake of Stephen’s death, Elizabeth feels she “is always alone now. Always alone, and never alone: that was grief” (13). Across the novel, she attempts to find the right words and imagery to describe the ways her grief feels. Osman writes that “For the last year her heartbeat has felt like a machine, a mechanical pump keeping her alive against her will, but now it feels flesh” (14). It takes a year for Elizabeth merely to feel human again, and the fact that her heart has kept her alive “against her will” emphasizes how devastating and far-reaching her experience of grief is. At times, she even wants “To punish herself” for continuing to live (15). While Elizabeth reflects internally on her grief, she struggles to discuss it with those close to her. Her conversation with Bogdan, who also grieves Stephen’s loss, represents a turning point in her arc—a scene in which she’s able to express her grief with vulnerability and feel seen and understood by someone who also loves and misses her husband.
Elizabeth’s grief over Stephen’s death fundamentally changes her, creating a ripple effect that defines her life going forward. Even as Elizabeth slowly rejoins her life, she is different. Donna feels that “she’s not the Elizabeth of old. She’s more polite now, on the defensive. Her pain is keeping her quiet. Donna longs to be patronized and dismissed by Elizabeth once more” (64). Others recognize the pain that persists, even when Elizabeth doesn’t speak of it. Elizabeth herself recognizes that she “feels pain differently now. Unbearable is the norm” (100). Elizabeth’s arc sees her learning to accept the ways her grief has altered her, integrating the changed parts of herself without losing her essence. She finally finds a fragile peace in the idea that her grief may have changed her, but she now has other resources, like her group of friends, who love, support, and work alongside her. Her healing process centers on accepting her grief as an integral part of her life and choosing to live anyway. She asks, “Has she been at her absolute best [….]? No, Elizabeth has to concede that she has not. Is that understandable? Yes. She is old, she is rusty, and she is grief-stricken. Does that make her useless? No” (305). A broken heart doesn’t leave Elizabeth without value, but it does mean she must rely on others in ways she’s not accustomed to.
Joyce and Joanna’s shared grief over the death of Gerry, several years before the events of the narrative, highlights the ongoing effects of loss. Although both of them have grown used to a world without Gerry, their grief flares up around Joanna’s wedding: a major life event in which her father would have taken a central role. Joyce reports, “Joanna asked if, whenever I look at her, I see Gerry, and I said that I did. And she said that, well, she also sees him every time she looks at me, so she wanted me walking down the aisle with her. So she could see her dad” (32). A happy occasion is changed, made bittersweet, by Gerry’s absence. Joyce and Joanna’s experience confirms what Carlito, the Coopers Chase bus driver, means when he says that grief “never gets better, but it gets easier” (47). Osman suggests that one’s grief is every bit as lasting and overwhelming as one’s love.
The Importance of Friendship and Community
The deep friendships and tight-knit community of the novel’s central protagonists form the foundation of Osman’s series. Each of them comes from different backgrounds, cultural frameworks, and experiences, but each finds a deep sense of loyalty, belonging, and chosen family in the others. Investigating murders provides them with a common purpose, but their love for each other is what sustains them as they navigate the challenges of growing older. Whether it is simply filling one’s days with activities or conversation, making plans to anticipate together, drinking tea, or solving murders, the Thursday Murder Club provides an emotional haven for its members.
The Impossible Fortune foregrounds the individual strengths that each character brings to the community, highlighting the ways those strengths complement and reinforce each other. Elizabeth is incisive and pragmatic, and she becomes ever more grateful for the presence of friends with other important and valuable qualities. For example, “Elizabeth had always known that Joyce possessed an emotional intelligence she lacked, but the sheer grace with which she had conducted herself this last year was extraordinary” (13). Elizabeth’s struggle to survive her grief allows her to appreciate the skills that her friends bring to their group. Across the novel, she learns to give up some of her control of the group’s movements, schedule, and priorities, affirming the strengths of others. When she and the club visit Davey, she allows Joanna to take the lead, though Joanna doesn’t do things that way Elizabeth would. The narrator says, “That’s certainly not where Elizabeth would have started […]. That’s where Joyce was so useful: she has a capacity for small talk that Elizabeth has always lacked. But Joanna […] came straight out and said things” (306). In recognizing how helpful, thoughtful, and accomplished her friends are, Elizabeth learns to allow herself to rely on them and the comfort and guidance they provide.
Osman utilizes the secondary character of Jasper to highlight the loneliness and sense of aimlessness that arise when one lacks community and companionship. Joyce immediately identifies that Jasper doesn’t know how to make people feel welcome, what he should say or do, or even how to dress appropriately. She advises him to purchase a few mugs and a box of teabags so he has something to offer guests. The next time they visit, she sees the mugs, and “Next to them, laid out in regimental order, are three tea bags” (133). Jasper’s brief interaction with Joyce empowers him to take action to feel less alone. When Joyce stands up to Elizabeth and says they are going to help Jasper pack the cats, Joyce asks if Jasper could make them some tea, and he responds “with an excitement that breaks Joyce’s heart” (134). Joyce’s ongoing overtures of friendship and compassion toward Jasper across the novel reinforce the impact of community and collective care.
Ron’s reflections on his relationship with his best friend, Ibrahim, highlight the importance of affirming one’s love for those in their life. Ron is happiest when he is “flat is […] fit to bursting” (138), and Ibrahim enjoys having Tia and Kendrick in his apartment because their presence makes him feel relaxed, purposeful, “and happy. [It] feels like a family” (276). Even Lord Townes regrets the way he’s spent his life because he feels that, in the end, no one loves him. The characters who experience loneliness and those who relish in their social communities prove just how life-giving friends are.
Navigating the Complexities of Aging
Each of the books in the Thursday Murder Club series emphasizes the ways its octogenarian protagonists subvert ageist assumptions about the elderly. Osman continues this thread in The Impossible Fortune while also exploring the challenges the characters experience as they navigate the downsides of aging, such as physical decline, isolation resulting from the progressive loss of one’s peers, and the need for additional support and care. Through Elizabeth and Joyce’s stories, Osman depicts the deep grief and loss of losing the people closest to them. Through Ibrahim, Jasper, and Lord Townes, Osman explores loneliness and the need for community and support. Ron experiences the indignity of physical changes that make daily life more challenging and even embarrassing, and endures the “protection” of loved ones who begin to keep him in the dark about painful truths, which he finds both patronizing and demoralizing.
Osman links the physical decline and increased need for care that comes with aging to a feeling of regression that his characters experience, comparing the beginning and ending stages of life. Across the novel, Ron makes this experience explicit, noting the specific ways his body is changing—the tremors in his fingers that make it harder to tie his shoes, the difficulty of recovering from a hangover, and the ways “he’s holding pints in both hands now […] his grip didn’t seem to be there anymore.” He notes that for Joanna’s wedding, “Pauline had tied his laces for him, like a child,” and watches a man in a pub getting his meat cut for him, resigning himself to the fact that “Bit by bit, you return to childhood” (291). Through Ron, Osman grapples with the inevitability of this need for additional care and support at both the beginning and end of life, and the ways accepting such help can feel like a kind of loss.
Beyond the physical realities of aging, each of the four protagonists fears the feeling of uselessness as they age, which affects their self-worth. When Ron realizes that Jason is lying to him about Suzi and Danny to protect him, it makes Ron feel weak. He asks, “Is this how it is from here on? Should he just accept it? To the family he looked after for so many years—as provider, protector, […] and chief rabble-rouser—he’s now the old man on the comfy chair in the corner? That’s where they are?” (76). Jason’s changed posture toward him makes Ron feel pathetic and underestimated. Similarly, Joyce fears that she’s the only member of the club who has failed to contribute to the investigation and feels like “a bit of a spare wheel all round” (271). Osman counters Joyce’s feeling of uselessness through Elizabeth’s specific acknowledgement of Joyce’s contributions, noting, “That’s where Joyce was so useful: she has a capacity for small talk that Elizabeth has always lacked” (306). Osman explicitly includes the word “useful” in Elizabeth’s description to emphasize that his elderly characters are still highly capable despite the challenges they experience as they grow older.
The Normalcy of Intergenerational Tension
Osman uses the relationships between Joyce and Joanna, and Ron and Jason, to explore the complex and ever-evolving relationships between parents and children. From the opening chapter, Osman foregrounds the tension in Joyce and Joanna’s relationship despite characterizing their bond as deeply loving, highlighting the normalcy of their conflict. Joanna longs to be loved for herself. Paradoxically, the fact that her mother loves her regardless of who she is or what she does makes it hard for Joanna to accept. Joanna notes that if “you obsess over your flaws and weaknesses, you constantly update the balance sheet of your own personality and find it wanting? Well, then the unconditional love of a parent is a sign that they simply don’t know you” (300). She doesn’t trust Joyce’s love and finds herself constantly mining her mother’s words and tone for criticism, constantly poking at it to see if it really is unconditional.
By including both women’s perspectives, Osman highlights the ways parents and children struggle to separate their identities from each other. For her part, Joyce’s journey centers on identifying the effect she has on her daughter and the ways that she’s treating Joanna’s life as an extension of her own. She writes, “I’ve been excited about [Joanna’s] wedding since before she was born, and I’ve played it through in my head so many times, and that’s why I was being unreasonable. I see all that now” (6). When Ibrahim and Donna note the similarities between Joyce and Joanna, intending the comparison as a compliment to them both, Joanna longs to differentiate herself from her mother, to prove that she’s more than the combination of genetics and upbringing.
Through Joanna, Osman recognizes the ubiquity of this kind of intergenerational tension. Joanna thinks of Joyce as “uniquely annoying, but [she] accepts that she’s the only one who thinks so […]. Her friends have always loved [Joyce]. But then her friends say the most awful things about their own mums, some of whom are delightful” (119). By framing the fraught nature of parent-child tension as universal, Osman allows it to exist alongside profound love and care.
Jason’s desire to protect his father out of love highlights the challenges of the role reversal dynamic that comes as a parent ages. While Ron recognizes the love that motivates Jason, it also irritates him because it forces him to acknowledge the changes and vulnerabilities in himself brought by age. Ron wants to feel that he is still capable and tough, hardly different from the way he used to be. Across the novel, Ron’s arc centers on reclaiming his sense of himself and his own autonomy and utility despite the ways his relationships with his children have evolved. In the story’s climax, Ron faces off against Danny, knowing that “he would sacrifice anything to save his daughter. And that’s exactly what he is about to do” (327). In the end, Ron finds a way to protect his children just as he always has.
Unlock every key theme and why it matters
Get in-depth breakdowns of the book’s main ideas and how they connect and evolve.
- Explore how themes develop throughout the text
- Connect themes to characters, events, and symbols
- Support essays and discussions with thematic evidence