You Dreamed of Empires

I was so impressed with Álvaro Enrigue’s You Dreamed of Empires that I am on my second reread

Parts of the novel play like an Aztec West Wing, taking us deep into the political manoeuvrings of the royal court but blending its particularities with 21st-century psychology. It’s a rich approach that achieves a hallucinatory vividness

Riotously entertaining… Natasha Wimmer brilliantly brings the author’s playfulness and idiomatic humour to life for an English-language readership. The result is a triumph of solemnity-busting erudition and mischievous invention that will delight and titillate

A mischievous fantasy… Enrigue plunges exuberantly into the revisionist speculation that rehabilitates Indiginous awareness and agency

A lively, arresting read – if 2024 brings more novels as original as this one, it will be a good year

An eclectic work of exceptional originality

Enrigue’s genius lies in his ability to bring readers close to its tangled knot of priests, mercenaries, warriors and princesses while adding a pinch of biting humor

Enrigue’s work is marked by an all-consuming attention to historical detail.... He is a preternaturally entertaining and erudite writer who builds alternate worlds from the minutiae. He also seems like he’s having a pretty good time

Incantatory... Enrigue conjures both court intrigue and city life with grace

[S]ublime absurdities... abound in this delirious historical fantasia, which can be said to be many things: funny, ghastly, eye-opening, marvelous and frequently confounding

[S]hort, strange, spiky and sublime... Enrigue, who is clearly a major talent, has delivered a humane comedy of manners that is largely about paranoia (is today the day my head will be lopped off?) and the quotidian bummers of life, even if you are powerful beyond belief

An alternate history of Mexican conquest, with a Tarantino-ready twist.... Deliciously gonzo.... Rendered in earthy, demotic, wryly unhistorical English by translator Natasha Wimmer... Enrigue’s antic style is high-minded, richly detailed, vulgar and sophisticated all at once — reminiscent of the films of Peter Greenaway or Derek Jarman

A riotous reimagining of the world-changing encounter, in 1520, between Hernán Cortés, the cocksure Spanish conquistador, and Moctezuma, melancholy emperor of the Mexica

[An] immensely playful tale… anything can happen and frequently does

One of the most extraordinary books I read last year, and now out in paperback. Savour it!

Álvaro Enrigue (Author) Álvaro Enrigue is a prize-winning Mexican writer. His novel You Dreamed of Empires was a New York Times Top 10 Best Book of 2024 and a Guardian Book of the Year, and his work has appeared in The New York Times, the London Review of Books, El País, and n+1, among other publications. A former Fellow at the Cullman Center and at Princeton University, he teaches Latin American Literature at Hofstra University and lives with his family in New York City. Natasha Wimmer (Translator) Natasha Wimmer’s translations include Álvaro Enrigue’s You Dreamed of Empires and Sudden Death and Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives and 2666. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York.

'An Aztec West Wing' GUARDIAN 
'I was so impressed that I'm on my second read' TORREY PETERS 
'A triumph' FINANCIAL TIMES 
'Glorious' i-D 
 
A NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOK OF 2024 
A GUARDIAN TOP FIVE TRANSLATED FICTION OF 2024 
 
In 1519, Conquistador Hernán Cortés and his troops ride into the floating city of Tenoxtitlan – today’s Mexico City – 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. 
 
Translated by Natasha Wimmer 
 
'A mischievous fantasy' TLS 
 
A NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY TOP TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR

Sudden Death

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 complex historical pageant of astonishing richness

Engaging, audacious, and flat-out fun... Sudden Death marks the arrival of a major player on the capital-L courts of literature

Intellectually formidable… Enrigue is a cerebral and sanguine Spanish-Language postmodernist… It takes literary bravery to be this candid as a writer

Dazzlingly clever and thrillingly original

Exhilarating, funny, and surprisingly sexy... 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

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.

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.

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

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

Lauren Groff, New York Times-bestselling author of Fates and Furies

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

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.

'Glorious' New York Times 
 
'Endlessly inventive', Guardian, Best Books of 2016 
 
'Wildly funny' Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies 
 
As Caravaggio, the libertine of Italy’s art world, and the loutish Spanish poet Quevedo aim to settle scores over the course of one brutal tennis match, the old European order edges closer to eruption. 
 
Across the ocean, in early sixteenth-century Mexico, the Aztec Empire is under the fatal grip of Hernán Cortés and his Mayan lover. While they scheme and conquer, fight and fuck, their domestic comedy will change the course of history, throwing the world – and Rome’s tennis match – into a mind-bending reverie of assassinations, executions, papal dramas, carnal liaisons and artistic revolution. 
 
Translated by Natasha Wimmer, the prize-winning translator of Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives and 2666.

Álvaro Enrigue

Natasha Wimmer

So original and funny… with Enrigue living between worlds—the worlds of the past and the present, but also of the real and the imagined

A baroque and semi-comic anti-Western... You can sense a bit of Bolaño in Enrigue: the postmodern playfulness, the cosmopolitanism, the historical conscience. Enrigue’s new one has a bit of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian... He’s one of the best we have, and he’s not done pushing against conventions

A thrillingly alive account… Enrigue recasts the so-called story of how the west was won, stripping it of the cultural shibboleths that have long dominated the discourse

By turns an impassioned anti-imperialist lament, a gripping alt-western, a meditation on human freedom, an autofictional travelogue... [Enrique] slowly binds the narrative threads tighter and tighter... revealing the pulsating truth at the heart of his book. For all that it might be the incarcerated Apaches who are at the sharp end of this tragedy, the forces that apparently necessitated their demise... have, Enrigue suggests, denied us all the chance of achieving the highest forms of human flourishing

Enrigue has a long career of writing brilliant and gripping literary accounts of Mexico’s history with a daring flair. His work is a moving and complex love letter to Mexico, mesmerizing anyone who has ever been awestruck by the country… It’s a slice of bloody American history with a timely edge

Offer[s] the satisfactions of Westerns, historical epics, and metafiction even as [Enrigue] overturns all three traditions... Enrigue is an erudite, charismatic raconteur... and his novel distills a byzantine swirl of historical events through the lives of a handful of very colorful characters

The Mexican novelist Álvaro Enrigue has a flair for bringing historical figures to life in fresh, unforgettable ways... a celebration of Apache defiance and resistance

[A] masterpiece. . . A collage of archival research, field diaries, film criticism, travelogues, nature writing, and narrative history that blurs the line between fiction and nonfiction, Enrigue’s book accomplishes a nearly impossible feat: It succeeds equally well as a breathtaking historical novel and as a groundbreaking work of political theory. . . Against the savagery of imperialism, Now I Surrender offers the nobility of statelessness

A kind of cubist Western, snarling convenient cultural narratives from a dizzying array of eras and perspectives

Álvaro Enrigue is a contemporary master of historical fiction and his new book continues his complex explorations of colonialism in the Americas

Simply no one is writing today like Álvaro Enrigue (and credit as well to his longtime translator, Natasha Wimmer)… It’s a mesmerizing read, and one that invites readers to learn about Apachería and unpack widely-held misconceptions about American history

Few authors are as ambitious as Enrigue, and his latest is further proof. Part epic and part alternative Western, Now I Surrender takes precise aim at the lies that the nation is built upon

A major work of historical reclamation. . . an eloquent rejoinder to the mythos that made two countries while erasing the lives of their original inhabitants

In treating the details of war and conquest as symbolic playthings, Enrigue brings to mind authors such as Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut – and of course, Thomas Pynchon

Where US authors seeking to revise the myths of the West have often dialed up the bloodshed … Enrigue’s preferred twist is a wry strain of humor… [His] deft handling of his densely researched material shines here, as do his cheeky departures from the historical record… By jumping back and forth between the perspectives of Mexican and American characters—as well as the immigrant narrator, whose experience spans both countries—he brings their visions of the Apache enemy, along with their self-justifications, into unbearable tension with each other

A thought-provoking meditation on defiance, defeat, and assimilation

As with Enrigue’s earlier books, he’s determined to upset narrative convention, and Wimmer, his longtime translator, handles his veering skillfully. Enrigue’s approach isn’t so much to lament the end of Apachería so much as to admire the steeliness of a tribe that survived centuries-long attempts to subdue it. A curious but effective treatment of an underappreciated effort to resist imperialism

It’s refreshing to read the work of an author unafraid to challenge readers with an adventure that is as brainy as it is fun… it’s a treat for patient readers who love historical fiction

A novel that roams fearlessly across styles, eras and countries, one of Mexico’s outstanding storytellers

Financial Times, Best summer books of 2026

In the contested borderlands between Mexico and the United States, a Mexican woman flees into the desert after a devastating raid on her dead husband’s ranch. Meanwhile, a lieutenant colonel of the fledgling Republic, sent in pursuit of cattle rustlers, will soon discover he’s on the trail of a more dramatic abduction.Decades later, with political ambitions on the line, the American and Mexican militaries try to manoeuvre Geronimo, the most legendary of Apache warriors, into surrender. And in our own day, a family travels through the region in search of a truer version of the past. 
 
Now I Surrender is Álvaro Enrigue’s most impassioned novel yet. Part epic, part alt-Western, it weaves past and present, myth and history, into a searing elegy for a way of life that was an incarnation of true liberty – that still sparks in us the thrill of almost unimaginable freedom.

Álvaro Enrigue

Praise for Now I Surrender

So original and funny… with Enrigue living between worlds—the worlds of the past and the present, but also of the real and the imagined

A baroque and semi-comic anti-Western... You can sense a bit of Bolaño in Enrigue: the postmodern playfulness, the cosmopolitanism, the historical conscience. Enrigue’s new one has a bit of Cormac McCarthy’s ...

A thrillingly alive account… Enrigue recasts the so-called story of how the west was won, stripping it of the cultural shibboleths that have long dominated the discourse

So original and funny… with Enrigue living between worlds—the worlds of the past and the present, but also of the real and the imagined

A baroque and semi-comic anti-Western... You can sense a bit of Bolaño in Enrigue: the postmodern playfulness, the cosmopolitanism, the historical conscience. Enrigue’s new one has a bit of Cormac McCarthy’s ...

A thrillingly alive account… Enrigue recasts the so-called story of how the west was won, stripping it of the cultural shibboleths that have long dominated the discourse

So original and funny… with Enrigue living between worlds—the worlds of the past and the present, but also of the real and the imagined

A baroque and semi-comic anti-Western... You can sense a bit of Bolaño in Enrigue: the postmodern playfulness, the cosmopolitanism, the historical conscience. Enrigue’s new one has a bit of Cormac McCarthy’s ...

A thrillingly alive account… Enrigue recasts the so-called story of how the west was won, stripping it of the cultural shibboleths that have long dominated the discourse

Books by Álvaro Enrigue

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