num_pages: 272
description: A daring kaleidoscopic novel about the clash of empires and ideas in the sixteenth century that continue to reverberate throughout modernitya story unlike anything youve ever read before. Sudden Death begins with a brutal tennis match that could decide the fate of the world. The bawdy Italian painter Caravaggio and the loutish Spanish poet Quevedo battle it out before a crowd that includes Galileo Mary Magdalene and a generation of popes who would throw Europe into the flames. In England Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII behead Anne Boleyn and her crafty executioner transforms her legendary locks into the most sought-after tennis balls of the time. Across the ocean in Mexico the last Aztec emperors play their own games as conquistador Hernn Corts and his Mayan translator and lover La Malinche scheme and conquer fight and f**k not knowing that their domestic comedy will change the world. And in a remote Mexican colony a bishop reads Thomas Mores Utopia and thinks that instead of a parody its a manual. In this mind-bending prismatic novel worlds collide time coils traditions break down. There are assassinations and executions hallucinogenic mushrooms utopias carnal liaisons and papal dramas artistic and religious revolutions love stories and war stories. A dazzlingly original voice and a postmodern visionary lvaro Enrigue tells a grand adventure of the dawn of the modern era in this short powerful punch of a novel. Game set match.
language: English
title: Sudden Death
publisher: Riverhead Books