I greatly enjoyed Adam Thirlwell's POLITICS and MISS HERBERT, clearly he is an incredibly versatile author with a quicksilver mind and a wonderfully clear and entertaining style to boot. THE FUTURE FUTURE epitomises Thirlwell's gifts as both a terrific storyteller and a gleefully promiscuous intellect.

This book is weird and fun and wonderful and so charming. Incredibly unexpected, I was thrilled by this. so anachronistic and bizarre, yet so captivating and readable. The characters were so interesting, with 21st century mindsets and habits, plopped into this hybrid historical world. This felt like an interesting experiment, writing about historical events as if they were happening today - using language and terminology centuries ahead of time interchangeably. The result is a tale that feels rooted in 2023, not the 18th century.
I can see how fans of historical fiction would be off put by this one, but I found it utterly compelling and easy to read. The modern parallels worked extremely well for me and I found this to be such a unique story that I'm eager to share with new readers.

Delighted to include this title in the October edition of Novel Encounters, my column highlighting the month’s most anticipated fiction for the Books section of Zoomer, Canada’s national culture magazine. (see column and mini-review at link)

In Adam Thirlwell's "The Future Future" we meet Celine, a 19-year-old, wealthy, married girl living in pre-revolution Paris when she finds herself in a problematic situation; someone is distributing pornographic pamphlets with her image, describing her habits and life. The accusations are false, but the series becomes popular, and soon, Celine is on everybody's lips as a new, intriguing subject to talk about.

The sudden disgrace of Celine can be compared to today's canceling culture. Celine's friends order food from Balthazar restaurant, which reminds me of Balthazar restaurant, a modern-day upscale place in New York. Writers who make Celine's social circle often talk about their scripts, not novels. "It was becoming more and more important to make a script into an opera. A script on its own was not enough, and maybe this was rational. To be real, it needed to be multiplied." Again, one can't escape comparing this approach to today's film productions. It's fun to find all those little hints when Adam Thirlwell winks at the reader, challenging us to look for resemblances in our world.

The dialog is modern, and the characters are similar to people today. It is almost as if the author put Celine and her friends on a transparent film of historical events, which moves behind them but mainly serves as a connection to modern times. It's easy to imagine Celine as a wealthy socialite, a celebrity or influencer searching for meaning in her life but not too concerned about finding it. She often reflects on her feelings and relationships or others' motives but is more of an observer than a person of action. However, she doesn't stay in one place – we travel with Celine to colonial America, then to the Moon (where she befriends an alien), and back to Earth to land in Napoleon's Paris.

The novel feels fresh in tackling the subject of history, touching even on the beginnings of our world. I enjoyed Celine's musings and comparing them to modern times. However, the book sometimes felt like a dress with too many embellishments. Perhaps it was why I never became thoroughly interested in Celine's life. There were glimpses when she seemed more relatable to me, especially while reading about female friendship and the issue of power, mainly in the hands of men, but overall, she stayed somehow distant. Ultimately, she enters the forest, and we see her becoming green, like the forest – or like a beautiful dream girl/woman who can live anywhere and nowhere.

I'm tapping out on this one at 40% - there's something interesting in the way the historical setting's being written about in a very contemporary manner, but the prose here is really hard to penetrate and I think this one is just Not For Me.

I was really excited when I got approved for this book, it sounded super interesting. The Future Future follows Celine, a French woman on the midst of her country's revolution, dealing with the sole condition of being a woman. I could not make sense of this story for the life of me. It felt incredibly flat, I couldn't care less about Celine, she never grew on me, and I love reading women's fiction. I skimmed most of the book, to be honest. It pulled me on a bit of a slump. It had a couple of good quotes but most of this book didn't make sense to me.

Thank you to netgalley and the publishers for the eARC.

Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the ebook. In the time before the French Revolution, Celine is seeing the stories of her affairs and orgies spread through society. People are appalled, but they also can’t stop listening. The problem is the stories aren’t true. Celine eventually has to flee to America, where she hears the rumors of many old friends who perished during the revolution. Celine misses France and her daughter and makes her way back home, only to run afoul of Napoleon. This is such a fun book, which uses modern dialogue, showing life for a woman alone in society and just how precarious that can be.

I tried. I really tried, Then I gave up. Thirwell has a lot to say and he says it all in this novel about a Celine, a French woman who is undone by allegations about all sort of things who first tries to influence others and then flees. It's initially set in the time around the French Revolution but then it catapults around to include a trip to the moon. All of that is fine, sort of but the language was oppressive- just too much. I ultimately DNF, albeit reluctantly. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. For fans of literary fiction.

What a long winded book that just drags and drags. How do you make a book set through the French revolution with a random trip to the moon boring? Write a bunch of characters I don't care about and make your writing as distant as possible. Something something language, power, patriarchy, time is a flat circle. There were some cool sentences and scenes but most of it was not for me.

I love the idea of this book, but the characters don’t feel real. The writing seems emotionless. nothing makes me care for these characters or want to root for them

Thirlwell's novel is certainly ambitious, eye-catching and interesting but whether I enjoyed it or not varied as I was reading.

An alternate history novel set in France during The Terror the novel follows the teenage socialite Celine as she is first the victim of gossip, then tries to control it and eventually finds herself outside of it.

One thing that I found a bit jarring though was Thirlwell's deliberate use of anachronisms in the text. Playwrights are referred to as "scriptwriters" and gas stations are mentioned even though the novel takes place in the late 1700s/early 1800s. This is obviously a deliberate choice by the author but I found the anachronisms too sparse to be anything but jarring while reading.

Still, as soon as I was done I wanted to flip back and read through it again. Interesting text, beautiful cover.

Couldn’t make sense of this one, nor did I much want to after the distasteful opening. Clever or incoherent? Not my cup of tea.

While I enjoyed reading this book, there was a lot of things happening that sometimes weren't easy to follow. I enjoyed the foundation of this book and the deep meaning woven throughout the story. It was an overall good read.

This book is like swimming through a beautiful dream. A statement on language and power and the impermanence and fluidity of both.

The setting of 19th C France I think helps ground the abstract concepts within a history with which most are familiar.

This is an incredible journey of Celine and survival in a wild world. One that will stay with you even years after reading.

eh . . . i can’t say i enjoyed this one. the style was rather dry and i never felt fully immersed in the story; the way thirlwell wrote celine was also a bit icky sometimes.

What a cool story.!
It's 1775 and we meet Celine - a young women married in France to a much older husband. For some odd reason, someone is inventing stories about her, distributing papers of poems telling about her sexual affairs. While the stories are lies, the citizens are hooked, her husband is less than amused and Celine is forced to find a new place to call home.

In this truly wild story, Celine fights back and works with her friends to overcome history. Can they succeed? #TheFutureFuture

Wow I loved this. Historical fiction yet futuristic in the thoughts and behaviours of the characters, especially the women (who doesn't live women supporting women). I loved seeing different topics being dealt with in this eighteenth century setting and following Celine on her journey. The Future Future is written in a beautiful way with an intriguing set of characters and storyline.

The Future Future by Adam Thirlwell is a truly unique and inventive historical novel that takes readers on a wild ride through time and space. Set in the eighteenth century, the novel follows Celine, a woman who finds herself the subject of scandalous rumors and lies spread by men who seek to control her. Thirlwell's writing is vivid and sensual, bringing to life a world of lavish parties and salons, of tulle and satin and sex. But this is also a world of revolution and resistance, where men rule with violence and language.

As Celine and her friends band together against evil and history, the novel takes readers on a journey through time and space, from France to colonial America to the moon. Thirlwell's language is dazzlingly inventive and blindingly bright, and his humor and modern sensibility make The Future Future a pleasure to read.

Ultimately, The Future Future is a novel about power, language, and the struggle for justice and truth in a world ruled by men. Thirlwell's characters are complex and compelling, and their quest for beauty and change feels urgent and contemporary. This is a novel like no other, and readers who enjoy inventive, boundary-pushing historical fiction will not want to miss it.

I absolutely loved reading this book. I was completely drawn into the topic and could not stop reading it.