Sudden Death: A Novel Summary
Alvaro Enrique

Sudden Death: A Novel Overview

Sudden Death is a quasi-historical novel that weaves fact with fiction in order to tell the story of an imagined tennis match in Rome between the artist Caravaggio and the Spanish poet Quevedo. The story of the tennis match is interwoven with depictions of Hernán Cortés and the Spanish conquests in the Americas, the machinations of the Counter-Reformation in Rome, and the passage across Europe of a tennis ball made from the hair of the executed English Queen Anne Boleyn. Its central themes are history, art, and tennis.