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Álvaro Enrigue is a Mexican writer who lives and teaches in New York A leading light in the Spanish-language literary world, he is published by the prestigious Barcelona imprint Anagrama His numerous awards include the Herralde Prize, one of the few in the megagalaxy of Spanish-language literary prizes that seems to align with Anglophone taste – former winners include Roberto Bolaño, Javier Marías, Enrique Vila-Matas and Juan Villoro He is also one of a number of writers, including Yuri Herrera, Andrés Neuman and Alejandro Zambra, that have been referred to as part of a new Latin American Boom (The original Boom included Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa) He is married to Valeria Luiselli, another eminent Mexican writer who has been thoughtfully translated and published in English; if the pair were in any doubt about their status as a literary power couple, they were then featured in Vogue in 2016, complete with moody black-and-white photo and the inimitably Vogue headline, ‘Married Mexican Writers Álvaro Enrigue and Valeria Luiselli on Their Buzzy New Novels and New York Life’   Enrigue has written four novels and two short story collections, between which there hang some common threads There is a consistent and interpenetrating concern with world history and the world’s current political dispensation Though Sudden Death (tr Natasha Wimmer) looks explicitly at the origins of transatlantic modernity, he has also said of it: ‘though set in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it is about the twenty-first’ I have seen him grimace hearing his work referred to as historical fiction, yet he has also spoken about the fact the novelist is in a good position to be ‘a prophet looking backwards’ His short story ‘A Samurai Sees the Sunrise in Acapulco’ (tr Rahul Bery), published in The White Review No 12, expands on a period in the 1600s when Japanese merchant ships, guarded by Samurai warriors, docked in Mexico; in Decencia [Decency], a character recounts his experience of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) and its heady aftermath Politics are sometimes addressed head-on and sometimes as subtexts: Enrigue is on record as saying that, given the chaos and