A complex historical pageant of astonishing richness
Guardian, Best Books of 2016
Engaging, audacious, and flat-out fun... <i>Sudden Death</i> marks the arrival of a major player on the capital-<i>L </i>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
'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.