Beneath the simple pleasure of a good story well told-and superbly translated by Sam Taylor-runs Binet’s signature brand of high-concept playfulness. If you read one novel this fall, make it this.” Civilizations is a serious success, in every sense of the word serious. Credit here goes to both Binet and his translator, Sam Taylor, whose English prose is clipped, opinionated, and vivid. “At once a profoundly thoughtful book and a very playful one. So, the stage is set for a Europe ruled by Incas and for a great war that will change history forever. Fortunately, he has a recent guidebook to acquiring power-Machiavelli’s The Prince. But most of all, downtrodden populations ready for revolution.

What does he find? The Spanish Inquisition, the Reformation, capitalism, the miracle of the printing press, endless warmongering between the ruling monarchies, and constant threat from the Turks. Thirty-nine years after that, Atahualpa, the last Inca emperor, arrives in Europe. Even after he is captured by the Taínos, his faith in his superiority and his mission is unshaken. įive hundred years later, Christopher Columbus is sailing for the Americas, dreaming of gold and conquest. 1000 CE: Erik the Red’s daughter heads south from Greenlandįreydis is the leader of a band of Viking warriors who get as far as Panama. It is an electrifying novel by one of Europe’s most exciting writers.Ĭ.

An ambitious and highly entertaining novel of revisionist history from the author of the international bestseller HHhH, Laurent Binet’s Civilizations is nothing less than a strangely believable counterfactual history of the modern world, fizzing with ideas about colonization, empire building, and the eternal human quest for domination.

Hhhh civilizations a novel