The imaginary 20th century

"From the author of The History of Forgetting and Bleeding Through comes a historical novel that is at once a comic picaresque and a treatise on the twentieth century. In 1901, a woman named Carrie, while traveling in Europe, selects four men to seduce her, each with a version of the coming century. Inevitably, the future spills off course. Gradually we discover that Carrie's misadventures are implicated in her uncle's world of business and political espionage. For over forty years, Harry Brown was hired by oligarchs to erase crimes that might prove embarrassing. Thus, as he often explains, espionage is a form of seduction. Enhanced by historical essays, The Imaginary 20th Century is a playful and yet deadly serious meditation on one sentence: the future can only be told in reverse"--Back cover.