Author(s): Adam Thirlwell

Novel | Goldsmiths Prize short list 2023 | Historical

Marie Antoinette meets Gossip Girl in this supermodern novel of scandal and slander, from the two-time Granta Best Young British Novelist

A wild story of female friendship, language and power, from France to colonial America to the moon, from 1775 to this very moment- a historical novel like no other.

It's the eighteenth century, and Celine is in trouble. Her husband is mostly absent. Her parents are elsewhere. And meanwhile men are inventing stories about her - about her affairs, her sexuality, her orgies 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 society.This is a world of decadence and saturation, of lavish parties and private salons, of tulle and satin and sex and violence. It's also one ruled by men - high on colonial genocide, natural destruction, crimes against women and, above all, language. 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.

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 *
A book filled with imaginative leaps, brave decisions and tiny details that give delight -- Colm Toibin, author of Brooklyn
A complex, brilliant book... Engrossing * Times Literary Supplement *
Sharp and witty and burningly original: a book that feels joyfully new -- Katherine Rundell, author of Super-Infinite
In typically bold style, Thirlwell subverts the traditions of the historical novel... The full range of Thirlwell's intellectual promiscuity abounds, with philosophy, language, science and anthropology coalescing into the book's utopian climax * AnOther Magazine *
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

Author Biography: Adam Thirlwell was born in London in 1978. The author of three previous novels, his work has been translated into thirty languages. His essays appear in the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, and he is an advisory editor of the Paris Review. His awards include a Somerset Maugham Award and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 2018 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has twice been selected by Granta as one of their Best of Young British Novelists.