"What if? What if the New World wasn't discovered, but was the discoverer. Hundreds of years before the Genoese adventurer lands a Viking renegade brings horses, iron, and disease to the Four Quarters (these lands will never be named the Americas). Now when Columbus sails west he and his men are never seen again. Instead, the Inca and his court arrive on the shores of a Europe already on the brink of monumental change. Wildly inventive, incredibly smart, and just plain funny, Binet once again redefines the historical novel."
Publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Publication Date 2021-09-14
Section New Hardcover - Fiction
Format Hardcover
ISBN 9780374600815
An ambitious and highly entertaining novel of revisionist history from the author of the international bestseller HHhH
Freydis is a woman warrior and leader of a band of Viking explorers setting out to the south. They meet local tribes, exchange skills, are taken prisoner, and get as far as Panama. But nobody ultimately knows what became of them.
Over five hundred years later, Atahualpa, the last Inca emperor, arrives in Europe in the ships stolen from Columbus. 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. But most of all he finds downtrodden populations ready for revolution. Fortunately, he has a recent bestseller as a guidebook to acquiring power—Machiavelli's The Prince. The stage is set for a Europe ruled by Incas and Aztecs, and for a great war that will change history forever.
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. It is an electrifying novel by one of Europe's most exciting writers.
