"Splendid" --New York Times
"Mind-bending." --Wall Street Journal
"Brilliantly original. The best new novel I've read this year."
--Salman Rushdie
A daring, kaleidoscopic novel about the clash of empires and ideas, told
through a tennis match in the sixteenth century between the radical
Italian artist Caravaggio and the Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo,
played with a ball made from the hair of the beheaded Anne Boleyn.
The poet and the artist battle it out in Rome before a crowd that
includes Galileo, a Mary Magdalene, and a generation of popes who would
throw the world into flames. In England, Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII
execute Anne Boleyn, and her crafty executioner transforms her legendary
locks into those most-sought-after tennis balls. Across the ocean in
Mexico, the last Aztec emperors play their own games, as the
conquistador Hernán Cortés and his Mayan translator and lover, La
Malinche, scheme and conquer, fight and f**k, not knowing that their
domestic comedy will change the course of history. In a remote Mexican
colony a bishop reads Thomas More's Utopia and thinks that it's a
manual instead of a parody. And in today's New York City, a man searches
for answers to impossible questions, for a book that is both an archive
and an oracle.
Álvaro Enrigue's mind-bending story features assassinations and
executions, hallucinogenic mushrooms, bawdy criminals, carnal liaisons
and papal schemes, artistic and religious revolutions, love and war. A
blazingly original voice and a postmodern visionary, Enrigue tells the
grand adventure of the dawn of the modern era, breaking down traditions
and upending expectations, in this bold, powerful gut-punch of a novel.
Game, set, match.
"Sudden Death is the best kind of puzzle, its elements so esoteric and
wildly funny that readers will race through the book, wondering how
Álvaro Enrigue will be able to pull a novel out of such an astonishing
ball of string. But Enrigue absolutely does; and with brilliance and
clarity and emotional warmth all the more powerful for its
surreptitiousness."
--Lauren Groff, New York Times-bestselling author of Fates and
Furies
"Engrossing... rich with Latin and European history." --The New Yorker
"[A] bawdy, often profane, sprawling, ambitious book that is as
engaging as it is challenging." ***--Vogue
