'Glorious' New York Times

'Endlessly inventive', Guardian, Best Books of 2016

'Wildly funny' Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies

As Caravaggio, the libertine of Italy's art world, and the loutish Spanish poet Quevedo aim to settle scores over the course of one brutal tennis match, the old European order edges closer to eruption.

Across the ocean, in early sixteenth-century Mexico, the Aztec Empire is under the fatal grip of Hernan Cortes and his Mayan lover. While they scheme and conquer, fight and fuck, their domestic comedy will change the course of history, throwing the world - and Rome's tennis match - into a mind-bending reverie of assassinations, executions, papal dramas, carnal liaisons and artistic revolution.

Translated by Natasha Wimmer, the prize-winning translator of Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives and 2666.

A funny and mind-bending novel about the clash of empires and ideas in the sixteenth century, told over the course of one dazzling tennis match

About the Author
Alvaro Enrigue was born in Mexico and lives in New York City. He is a literature professor at Hofstra University. Sudden Death - his first novel to be translated into English - was awarded the prestigious Herralde Prize in Spain, the Elena Poniatowska International Novel Award in Mexico, and the Barcelona Prize for Fiction.

Reviews
A complex historical pageant of astonishing richness * Guardian, Best Books of 2016 *
Engaging, audacious, and flat-out fun... Sudden Death marks the arrival of a major player on the capital-L courts of literature * Vice *
Intellectually formidable... Enrigue is a cerebral and sanguine Spanish-Language postmodernist... It takes literary bravery to be this candid as a writer * New Statesman *
Dazzlingly clever and thrillingly original * Mail on Sunday *
Exhilarating, funny, and surprisingly sexy... Enrigue turns historical figures into real, flesh-and-blood people and really gets you thinking about art and history: what qualifies as either - and why * Buzzfeed *
Brilliant... Enrigue has crafted a tennis allegory for the modern age: a heady, raucous meditation on chaos, power, language and the ways in which history is created and preserved... Enrigue blends historical elements with fantasy to conjure a light, knowing and very funny history in which the present is always lurking beneath the surface... Enrigue's prose is endlessly inventive, full of aphorisms, wry anecdotes and swaggering declarations. * Financial Times *


Awards
Short-listed for Oxford Wiedenfeld Translation Prize 2017 (UK).



Book Information
ISBN 9780099598053
Author Alvaro Enrigue
Format Paperback
Page Count 256
Imprint Vintage
Publisher Vintage Publishing
Weight(grams) 181g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 129mm * 16mm