The Future Future

Short-listed for the Goldsmiths Prize

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 and spreads 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, Adam Thirlwell’s The Future Future follows one woman on an urgently contemporary quest to clear her name and change the world.

Adam Thirlwell is an internationally celebrated novelist and essayist whose works have been translated into thirty languages. His essays appear in TheNew York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, and he is the London 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 lives in London.