'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 Hernán Cortés 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 Bolaño's The Savage Detectives and 2666.

Prizes

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

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 *

Álvaro Enrigue (Author)
Álvaro Enrigue is a prize-winning Mexican writer whose most recent novel is You Dreamed of Empires. His work has appeared in The New York Times, the London Review of Books, El País, and n+1, among other publications. A former Fellow at the Cullman Center and at Princeton University, he teaches Latin American Literature at Hofstra University and lives with his family in New York City.

Natasha Wimmer (Translator)
Natasha Wimmer’s translations include Álvaro Enrigue’s You Dreamed of Empires and Sudden Death and Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives and 2666. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York.