> Skip to content
  • Published: 21 November 2023
  • ISBN: 9781787334410
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 352
  • RRP: $34.99

The Future Future

‘Unlike anything else’ Salman Rushdie




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...

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 GOLDSMITHS PRIZE*

It's the eighteenth-century and Celine is in trouble

'A terrific novel'
FINANCIAL TIMES

'A radically beautiful new novel'
SHEILA HETI, author of Pure Colour

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.

  • Published: 21 November 2023
  • ISBN: 9781787334410
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 352
  • RRP: $34.99

About the author

Adam Thirlwell

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.

Also by Adam Thirlwell

See all

Praise for The Future Future

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

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

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

A book filled with imaginative leaps, brave decisions and tiny details that give delight

Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn

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, author of Midnight's Children

Sharp and witty and burningly original: a book that feels joyfully new

Katherine Rundell, author of Super-Infinite

An energised, radically different novel

Sainsbury's Magazine

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

A complex, brilliant book... Engrossing

Times Literary Supplement

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

A luminous book, brimming with originality and cleverness

Mail on Sunday

Dazzling and unnerving

ArtReview

Thirlwell has a terrific ear for dialogue

Times Literary Supplement, *Books of the Year*