A madcap story of female friendship, language, and power, from France
to colonial America to the moon, from 1775 to this very moment, a
historical novel like no other.
It's the eighteenth century, and Celine is in trouble. Her husband is mostly
absent, fighting and fraternizing with foreign diplomats. Her parents are
elsewhere. And a man, somewhere, is telling stories about her - about her
affairs, her sexuality, her mad orgies and addictions and assignations. The
stories aren't true, but everyone loves them, spreading them like a terrible
plague. Celine watches as her name becomes a symbol for everything rotten
and wrong and naughty in the world.
This is a world of decadence, saturation, and rot, of lavish parties and private
salons, of purified guava and raki, of tulle and satin and sex and violence. This
is a world ruled by men who are high on genocide, colonial expansion, forest
redevelopment, political theory, violence against women, and, above all,
language.
As France hurtles toward revolution and the planet whirls around the sun,
Celine and her friends - the beautiful, stern Marta; the young Marie Antoinette
- band together against evil and the tides of history in search of justice, truth,
and beauty.
Adam Thirlwell's The Future Future is set in 1775 and in the present moment;
in Europe and America and on the high seas and, briefly, on the moon. Wildly
inventive, hilarious, supermodern, and blindingly bright, it follows one woman
on a quest to clear her name and change the world.
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 its Best of Young
British Novelists.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
On Sale: Oct 17/23
5.38 x 8.25 • 352 pages
9780374607616 • $37.00 • CL - With dust jacket
Fiction / Literary