Sudden Death

Sudden Death by Alvaro Enrigue is a writer who crafts a story like no other.

A daring, kaleidoscopic novel about the clash of empires and ideas, told through a tennis match in the sixteenth century between the radical Italian artist Caravaggio and the Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo, played with a ball made from the hair of the beheaded Anne Boleyn.

The poet and the artist battle it out in Rome before a crowd that includes Galileo, a Mary Magdalene, and a generation of popes who would throw the world into flames. In England, Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII execute Anne Boleyn, and her crafty executioner transforms her legendary locks into those most-sought-after tennis balls. Across the ocean in Mexico, the last Aztec emperors play their own games, as the conquistador Hernán Cortés and his Mayan translator and lover, La Malinche, scheme and conquer, fight and f**k, not knowing that their domestic comedy will change the course of history. In a remote Mexican colony a bishop reads Thomas More’s Utopia and thinks that it’s a manual instead of a parody. And in today’s New York City, a man searches for answers to impossible questions, for a book that is both an archive and an oracle.

Álvaro Enrigue’s mind-bending story features assassinations and executions, hallucinogenic mushrooms, bawdy criminals, carnal liaisons and papal schemes, artistic and religious revolutions, love and war. A blazingly original voice and a postmodern visionary, Enrigue tells the grand adventure of the dawn of the modern era, breaking down traditions and upending expectations, in this bold, powerful gut-punch of a novel.

Enrigue, Alvaro. (2013). Sudden Death. New York: Riverhead. 

You Dreamed of Empires

You Dreamed of Empires by Alvaro Enrigue, translated to English by Natasha Wimmer, is the story of Moctezuma and Cortes in 1915 Mayapan. 

In 1519, Conquistador Hernán Cortés and his troops ride into the floating city of Tenoxtitlan in this hallucinatory, revelatory, colonial revenge story.

Invited to a ceremonial meal with the steely princess Atotoxtli, sister and wife of the emperor Moctezuma, the Spanish nearly bungle their entrance into the city and its labyrinthine palace. Soon, one of Cortés’s captains, Jazmín Caldera, begins to question the ease with which they were welcomed, and wonders at the risks of getting out alive, much less conquering the empire.

Moctezuma himself is at a political, spiritual and physical crossroads, relying on hallucinogens in a quest for any kind of answer from the gods. When Cortés and Moctezuma meet, two worlds, empires, languages, and possible futures collide.

You Dreamed of Empires brings to life Tenoxtitlan at its height – and reimagines its destiny. It sets afire the moment of conquest and turns it into a moment of revolution, in a novel so electric and so unique that it feels like a dream. This book is amazing! Enrigue has written a fabulous book. You may want to follow up with the book Malinalli about one of Cortes's translators who is a fascinating woman.

Enrigue, Alvaro. (2024). You Dreamed of Empires. New York: Riverhead Books.