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.

Publisher Review

In The Future Future, 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 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, the Booker Prize-winning author of Midnight's Children A book filled with imaginative leaps, brave decisions and tiny details that give delight. -- Colm Toibin, author of Brooklyn Sharp and witty and burningly original: a book that feels joyfully new. -- Katherine Rundell, author of Super-Infinite A landmark - precisely because it's so deeply embedded in our history and is so unthinkably original. -- Edmund White, author of A Previous Life 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 The Future Future is Adam Thirlwell's best novel - but it's also the best novel anyone else has written anywhere for many years. Daring, funny, powerful and deeply imaginative - asking profound questions about the nature of revolution, about the rules of history and power, and about the strange times we find ourselves in. -- Daniel Kehlmann, author of Measuring the World This is a breathtaking book, one that constantly surprises. It makes you think and, in a delicious combination, it makes you laugh. Set amidst the turbulence of ideas and movements that sped across salons, countries and continents in the latter part of the 18th century, it tumbles that revolution into one of our own. Its heroine, Celine, has an aura of innocence but she's also a thoroughly modern woman, polymorphous in her sexuality, a winningly talented creator of networks of resistance in a world where the power relations between the sexes are as brutal as our own. -- Lisa Appignanesi, author of Mad, Bad, and Sad [An] energised, radically different novel * Sainsbury's Magazine *