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. The stage is set for a Europe ruled by Incas and Aztecs, and for a great war that will change history forever.

Fortunately, he has a recent bestseller as a guidebook to acquiring power-Machiavelli's The Prince. But most of all he finds downtrodden populations ready for revolution. He finds a continent divided by religious and dynastic quarrels, the Spanish Inquisition, Luther's Reformation, capitalism, the miracle of the printing press, endless warmongering between the ruling monarchies, and constant threat from the Turks. Thirty years later, Atahualpa, the last Inca emperor, arrives in Europe in the ships stolen from Columbus. Even as their suffering increases, his faith in his superiority, and in his mission, is unshaken. But he and his men are taken captive by Incas. But nobody ultimately knows what became of them.įast forward five hundred years to 1492 and we're reading the journals of Christopher Columbus, mid-Atlantic on his own famous voyage of exploration to the Americas, dreaming of gold and conquest. They meet local tribes, exchange skills, are taken prisoner, and get as far as Panama. It is an electrifying novel by one of Europe's most exciting writers.įreydis is a woman warrior and leader of a band of Viking explorers setting out to the south. 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