Civilizations

By Laurent Binet, Sam Taylor (translator),

Book cover of Civilizations

Book description

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. It is an electrifying…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Civilizations as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I'm not always crazy about alternate history as a genre, but this counterfactual look at the encounter between the Americas and "the Old World" was gripping, thought-provoking, and immersive. I'm a huge fan of Cervantes, El Greco, and Montaigne, and to see all three characters in this book, all of them thrown into a situation totally unlike what happened in Europe in the 1500s, yet all of them acting and reacting in ways that seem totally in character for them, was a great pleasure.

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