"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.
Ãlvaro 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 Ãlvaro 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.â€Â —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.â€Â —Vogue