The Future Future

The Future Future

Adam Thirlwell

A madcap 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, fighting and fraternizing with foreign diplomats. Her parents are elsewhere. And a man, somewhere, is telling stories about her--about her affairs, her sexuality, her mad orgies and addictions and assignations. The stories aren't true, but everyone loves them, spreading them like a terrible plague. Celine watches as her name becomes a symbol for everything rotten and wrong and naughty in the world. This is a world of decadence, saturation, and rot, of lavish parties and private salons, of purified guava and raki, of tulle and satin and sex and violence. This is a world ruled by men who are high on genocide, colonial expansion, forest redevelopment, political theory, violence against women, and, above all, language. As France hurtles toward revolution and the planet whirls around the sun, Celine and her friends--the beautiful, stern Marta; the young Marie Antoinette--band together against evil and the tides of history in search of justice, truth, and beauty. Adam Thirlwell's The Future Future is set in 1775 and in the present moment; in Europe and America and on the high seas and, briefly, on the moon. Wildly inventive, hilarious, supermodern, and blindingly bright, it follows one woman on a quest to clear her name and change the world.