The Future Future
The intoxicating historical novel 'unlike anything else' Salman Rushdie
Published on 10. August 2023
352 pages
978-1-5299-0309-6 (ISBN)
Description
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 GOLDSMITHS PRIZE*
It's the eighteenth-century and Celine is in trouble
'A terrific novel'
FINANCIAL TIMES
'A radically beautiful new novel'
SHEILA HETI, author of Pure Colour
Paris, 1775: Celine's husband is mostly absent. Her parents are elsewhere. Meanwhile men are inventing stories about her - about her affairs, her sexuality, and addictions...
All these stories are lies, but the public loves them - spreading them like a virus. Celine can only watch as her name becomes a symbol for everything rotten in this society ruled by men high on colonial genocide, natural destruction, and crimes against women. To survive, Celine and her friends must band together in search of justice, truth and beauty.
Fantastical, funny and blindingly bright, The Future Future follows one woman on an urgently contemporary quest to clear her name and change the world.
It's the eighteenth-century and Celine is in trouble
'A terrific novel'
FINANCIAL TIMES
'A radically beautiful new novel'
SHEILA HETI, author of Pure Colour
Paris, 1775: Celine's husband is mostly absent. Her parents are elsewhere. Meanwhile men are inventing stories about her - about her affairs, her sexuality, and addictions...
All these stories are lies, but the public loves them - spreading them like a virus. Celine can only watch as her name becomes a symbol for everything rotten in this society ruled by men high on colonial genocide, natural destruction, and crimes against women. To survive, Celine and her friends must band together in search of justice, truth and beauty.
Fantastical, funny and blindingly bright, The Future Future follows one woman on an urgently contemporary quest to clear her name and change the world.
Reviews / Votes
The Future Future is a terrific novel: a testament to female friendship, an adventure story, a political commentary and a hymn to the power of language crafted into a unique and compelling shape * Financial Times * Adam Thirlwell considers the celestial and the political on the same plane, creating wondrous new ways of seeing history, nature, friendship and time. He weaves together so many wisps of reality, and the result is a radically beautiful new novel that is funny, touching, memorable and bright -- Sheila Heti, author of Pure Colour A luminous book, brimming with originality and cleverness * Mail on Sunday * Sex, revolution and death in eighteenth-century France and America, described in the language of the future, and featuring an astonishing visit to the moon. A dazzling performance, unlike anything else you'll read this (or any other) year -- Salman Rushdie, author of Midnight's Children Thirlwell's prose is hypnotic and coolly beautiful. The writing is full of dreamlike leaps, not just at the level of plot, but in its sentences, too... The Future Future has a beauty and a mysterious power that reflect its enigmatic protagonist * Guardian * A book filled with imaginative leaps, brave decisions and tiny details that give delight -- Colm Toibin, author of Brooklyn A complex, brilliant book... Engrossing * Times Literary Supplement * Sharp and witty and burningly original: a book that feels joyfully new -- Katherine Rundell, author of Super-Infinite I am utterly obsessed by Adam Thirlwell's dazzling, effervescent The Future Future. More epic than The Favourite, more vivid than Marie Antoinette, his prose sandblasts the dust off history, revealing the untold stories of real women - raw, sexy, funny and glinting with life. The Future Future is a parachute in time, both modern and timeless, unflinching and hilarious. Mesmerising. I'm transfixed -- Polly Stenham, author of That Face A landmark - precisely because it's so deeply embedded in our history and is so unthinkably original -- Edmund White, author of A Previous LifeMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Vintage Publishing
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
File size
0,91 MB
ISBN-13
978-1-5299-0309-6 (9781529903096)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
Adam Thirlwell was born in London in 1978. The author of three previous novels, his work has been translated into thirty languages. His essays appear in the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, and he is an advisory editor of the Paris Review. His awards include a Somerset Maugham Award and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 2018 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has twice been selected by Granta as one of their Best of Young British Novelists.
