The Future Future

Adam Thirlwell Press Reviews

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

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 Tóibín, author of Brooklyn

A luminous book, brimming with originality and cleverness. - Mail on Sunday

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

Sharp and witty and burningly original: a book that feels joyfully new. -- Katherine Rundell, author of Super-Infinite A complex, brilliant book... engrossing. - Times Literary Supplement

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

The Future Future is a joy to read: extravagant and funny and insightful about the nature of experience and love and gossip, with sentences that trip and shimmer off the page ... It is like nothing I’ve ever read before - Literary Hub

An energised, radically different novel. - Sainsbury's Magazine

With effervescent wit and fierce originality… Thirlwell spins a dazzling tale around an obnoxious 18th-century smear campaign and a woman hellbent on clearing her name. - Yorkshire Evening Post