Adam Thirlwell
The Future Future
“Unlike anything else you’ll read this (or any other) year”
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
Walker Books, 2023
It's the eighteenth-century and Celine is in trouble.
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.
About the Author
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.
