All Passion Spent tells the marvellously cheering story of how, in widowhood, a conventional woman is finally able to defy her family

Sackville-West writes simply wonderfully and many passages make me laugh out loud

Heartening

Inspiring... Old age can be celebrated, not feared

Every page of this novel is a pleasure to read

Behind its lyrical prose is the idea of how important it is to lay claim to your own space, however late in life

Sackville-West's wickedly funny All Passions Spent is her best novel by a mile... Superb

A moving portrait of an old age in which something of the potential self can be recovered… Superb.

It’s the ideal moment for those not acquainted with her work to read this engaging, memorable novel… Written in engaging prose that is crisp and witty and hums with vitality… it tells us the important truth that life can begin again at eighty-eight.

A rare example of an artful, comedic, deeply literary novel with the potential to become a fixture on bookshelves everywhere

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.

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.

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.

This is one of those books that defies pigeonholing as a novel one of those that break the mould.

An outstanding translation by Natasha Wimmer. It is a suitably strange, light-footed but historically weighty construction that centers around a fake tennis match... It is a brilliant synthesis of art, history, religion, power politics, and—yes—tennis, a complex study of our world via the world that gave birth to modernity. It is much like an American postmodern book, except it is very different from, say, a Pynchon or a DeLillo since it is carried along by Álvaro's very Mexican wit and sensibility, as well as his own intuitive logic.

Sudden Death is very, very funny and it is unfailingly brilliant and I have no idea how to describe it - another one of its rare virtues. I might say it is about tennis, or history, or art, or absurdity, but more accurate would be to say, simply, that it’s essential reading

Sudden Death is the best kind of puzzle, its elements so esoteric and wildly funny that readers will race through the book, wondering how Álvaro Enrigue will be able to pull a novel out of such an astonishing ball of string. But Enrigue absolutely does; and with brilliance and clarity and emotional warmth all the more powerful for its surreptitiousness

Exuberantly intellectual… Enrigue transmutes the familiar, and shifts our awareness. Sudden Death is an original, transformative work

Beautifully rendered from the Spanish by 2666 translator Natasha Wimmer, Sudden Death is one of the most engaging, audacious, and flat-out fun works of fiction I've read in a while

Sudden Death is a unique object – tropical and transatlantic; hypermodern and antiquarian—a specialized literary instrument designed to resist the deadly certainties of universal history. But don’t let that confuse you. Sure, his method may be all playfulness and multiplicity, but Álvaro Enrigue is the most disabused novelist I know

A story of history plunging forward and the world at a defining moment. Rackets are raised; the court looms large. Finally a tale that truly defies the bounds of the novel

A full-fledged writer

The speculative weight of this novel is brilliant, intriguing. No less brilliant is its unreliable narration

[Enrigue] belongs to many literary traditions at once and shows a great mastery of them all. . . . His novel belongs to Max Planck’s quantum universe rather than the relativistic universe of Albert Einstein: a world of coexisting fields in constant interaction and whose particles are created or destroyed in the same act

One of the best novels I’ve read all year… You’d be hard-pressed to find a book that was at once so bold in style and ambitious in structure and so much fun to read.

Sudden Death is fun and audacious and erudite.

Sudden Death is a complex historical pageant of astonishing richness that portrays the imperial ambitions of Spain and the power struggle of the Italian states, the cultural clashes between the Catholic church and the people of the new world, the conflict between the creative arts and the dogmas of the time. It is also a history of tennis.

Fanciful, erudite, hilarious.