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

The Future Future is a terrific novel: a testament to female friendship, an adventure story, a political commentary and a hymn to the power of language crafted into a unique and compelling shape * Financial Times * 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 A luminous book, brimming with originality and cleverness * Mail on Sunday * 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, author of Midnight’s Children Thirlwell’s prose is hypnotic and coolly beautiful. The writing is full of dreamlike leaps, not just at the level of plot, but in its sentences, too… The Future Future has a beauty and a mysterious power that reflect its enigmatic protagonist * Guardian *