A funny and mind-bending novel about the clash of empires and ideas in the sixteenth century, told over the course of one dazzling tennis match

"Brilliant... Enrigue has crafted a tennis allegory for the modern age: a heady, raucous meditation on chaos, power, language and the ways in which history is created and preserved... Enrigue blends historical elements with fantasy to conjure a light, knowing and very funny history in which the present is always lurking beneath the surface... Enrigue's prose is endlessly inventive, full of aphorisms, wry anecdotes and swaggering declarations." Financial Times "Marks the arrival of a major player on the capital-L courts of literature" Vice "An exhilarating, funny, and surprisingly sexy read. Enrigue turns historical figures into real, flesh-and-blood people and really gets you thinking about art and history: what qualifies as either - and why" Buzzfeed "Ingenius and clever... Engagingly original... There are traces of Pynchon's zany allure... Sudden Death is rich and lively with warmth which counters the bleakness of history." -- Eileen Battersby Irish Times "Glorious... [Enrigue's] approach has both great entertainment value and intellectual appeal, especially as a corrective to a Eurocentric view of history... A splendid introduction to Mr. Enrigue's varied body of work" New York Times "A complex historical pageant of astonishing richness." -- Alberto Manguel Guardian "Intellectually formidable... Enrigue is a cerebral and sanguine Spanish-Language postmodernist... It takes literary bravery to be this candid as a writer." -- Randy Boyagoda New Statesman "Ambitious... Champion storytelling... What makes the novel so enthralling is the intimate humanity of its characters... Throughout this mercurial novel, playing fast and loose with facts lets richer truths about the world emerge." Washington Post "By turns intellectual and earthy, Enrigue's fictionalized account of Renaissance Europe and 16th century Mexico is the best kind of history lesson: erudite without being stuffy, an entertaining work that incorporates the Counter-Reformation, the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire, art history and even a grammar lesson on Spanish diminutives into one mesmerizing narrative." San Francisco Chronicle "An absolute pleasure to read. It is an intriguing story and the interspersed historical aspects were fascinating and kept me interested throughout. The story is beautifully written but the manner in which the author described the tennis match was outstanding." -- Jo Kirk Nudge