Alvaro Enrigue

A 1599 Roman tennis match between the Italian painter Caravaggio and the Spanish poet Quevedo represents the way the world changed in their times, in a novel that goes from the execution of Anne Boleyn to Mexico after the conquest.

Sudden Death

Dana Kraft

This is an impressively designed story and by the end I really came to appreciate how everything fit together. That being said, I was ready to give up several times because I didn't really care about the story(stories). The last handful of chapters didn't resolve that problem for me, it just gave me more insight into why the author wrote the story the way he did. 

I did like the background info on the game of tennis, which I didn't know. For me, the most thought-provoking part of the book was how the author played with names, titles, nicknames, etc for his characters and how those names communicate some info about the character rightly or wrongly.

lucinda ventimiglia

Álvaro Enrigue

Selected as a Guardian best book of 2016 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 A brutal tennis match in Rome. Two formidable opponents: the wild Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and the loutish Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo. Galileo, Saint Matthew and Mary Magdalene heckle from the sidelines. In England, Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII execute Anne Boleyn, and her 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 Hern�n Cort�s and his Mayan translator and lover scheme and conquer, fight and fuck, not knowing that their domestic comedy will change the course of history. Over the course of one dazzling tennis match - through assassinations and executions, carnal liaisons and papal dramas, artistic and religious revolutions, love and war - Sudden Death tells the grand adventure of the clash of empires and the dawn of the modern era.

Sudden Death

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