Civilisations

From the bestselling author of HHhH

A wild romp of a book that turns history on its head

A bold and thrilling experiment in counter-factual history from a masterful storyteller

Characteristically ambitious, brilliant...Combining all the pleasure of a period romp with vital questions about our shared origin stories...a triumph

A propulsive 'counter-factual' romp...both dizzying and fun

Civilisations provides a whole series of what-ifs, concertinaing known facts in new and surprising ways

Imagine that Christopher Columbus never made it back to Spain - and that the Incas weren't conquered by Spain but instead invaded Europe, replacing Christianity with sun worship....the distant tone enables some enjoyably tart humour about European mores as seen through Incan eyes

Binet's best book yet: the work of a major writer just hitting his stride. A delightful counterfactual novel. *****

One of the most successful French writers of his generation... a wild romp of a book that turns history on its head

[A] hugely entertaining counterfactual history of the making of the modern world... Binet has riotous, brainy fun in a rollicking story of the urge to power, which delights in turning received ideas upside down

Times Literary Supplement, *Summer Reads of 2021*

[A] glorious counterfactual novel... Funny and profound, this is Binet's best novel yet

Laurent Binet (Author) Laurent Binet lives and works in France. His first novel, HHhH, was an international bestseller which won the prestigious Prix Goncourt du premier roman, among other prizes. The 7th Function of Language won the Prix de la FNAC and Prix Interallié. Civilisations is a bestseller that has won the Grand Prix de l'Académie française. Sam Taylor (Translator) Sam Taylor is an award-winning literary translator and novelist. He has translated more than 60 books from French including Laurent Binet's HHhH and Leila Slimani's Lullaby.

It's world history. But not as we know it. 
 
c.1000AD: Erik the Red's daughter heads south from Greenland 
1492: Columbus does not discover America 
1531: the Incas invade Europe 
 
Freydis is the leader of a band of Viking warriors who get as far as Panama. Nobody knows what became of them. Five hundred years later, Christopher Columbus is sailing for the Americas, dreaming of gold and conquest. Even when captured, his faith in his mission is unshaken. 
 
 Thirty years after that, Atahualpa, the last Inca emperor, arrives in a Europe ready for revolution. Fortunately, he has a recent guidebook to acquiring power - Machiavelli's The Prince. So, the stage is set for a Europe ruled by Incas and, when the Aztecs arrive on the scene, for a great war that will change history forever. 
 
 
'Binet's best book yet: the work of a major writer just hitting his stride. A delightful counterfactual novel' ***** - Daily Telegraph

The 7th Function of Language

An electrifying literary conspiracy thriller from the internationally bestselling author of HHhH.

Establishes Laurent Binet as the clear heir to the late Umberto Eco, writing novels that are both brilliant and playful, dense with ideas while never losing sight of their need to entertain... One of the funniest, most riotously inventive and enjoyable novels you’ll read this year

A hugely entertaining novel, taking delight in its own twists and turns

Lively, earthy, experimental, ambitious, clever and endlessly entertaining… Smart, witty, direct, cool

The premise is a stroke of genius. Roland Barthes did not die following an accident in 1980; he was murdered… The strands of the plot are skilfully interwoven through a dual process of fictionalisation of the real and realisation of the fictional

An almost filmic detective romp, taking in glamorous international locations, killer dogs, Bulgarian secret agents, several varieties of sex and wild car chases

A smart spoof thriller, cheekily taking as its cat the most famous Parisian intellectuals in the scene in 1980… It’s all fun and games, ever so clever, and highly self-congratulatory for those of us who wasted years studying the abstruse and ultimately worthless theories of these French thinkers

Laurent Binet is possessed of something like Superman’s X-ray vision combined with a million lasers. When he gets something in his sights, that thing is dead. And what he kills in his new novel is literary theory, in all its fake unuseful stupidity…. Reading Binet gives you that rare pleasure of feeling that you’re losing your grip on reality… What Binet can do with a scene, a paragraph, is beyond belief… One suspects Binet will make, or perhaps already has made, a lot of enemies with his jaw-droppingly disrespectful, extremely witty and – yes – heartfelt book. But one thing’s for sure, he’ll know how to handle them

Incredibly timely ... very entertaining, like a dirty Midnight in Paris for the po-mo set

On one level it’s a nostalgic look at a period in which French thinkers spent less time brooding on national identity… And on another it’s an exercise in pure intellectual slapstick of the kind that French humourists do well… It’s possible that his novel shares a few shreds of DNA with Zoolander

[A] global conspiracy thriller involving French philosopher Roland Barthes and a deadly new language.

The writing is subtly done and the pages are turning and the intrigue grows. As does the smile – the language is entertaining

A rollicking crime caper about the death of Roland Barthes. It had me rolling on the floor of the Paris Metro when I read it.

Admirably ambitious romp of a thing that reads like a thinking-man's Da Vinci Code, if such a thing were ever conceivable… This is hugely entertaining, laugh-out-loud stuff

It’s a rollicking ride, with Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva and a preening Bernard Henri-Lévy popping up to have their say… I dare you to read it and not hum the Pink Panther theme throughout

Yes, structuralism and semiotics feature prominently, but never in an alienating way – if anything, it’s a playful introduction to critical theory. And it’s great to see behemoths of the French philosophical establishment like Foucault and Lacan taken down a peg or two in some downright feral cameos

Laurent Binet’s The 7th Function of Language…was the most outrageously entertaining novel of the year, a defamatory fantasy about the supposed secret lives of eminent post-structuralists. A joy

A conspiracy thriller about the death of the French literary theorist, Roland Barthes, that draws on the work of Jacques Derrida and Dan Brown with tongue firmly in cheek—to hilarious effect.

'One of the funniest, most riotously inventive and enjoyable novels you’ll read this year' - Observer 
 
Roland Barthes is knocked down in a Paris street by a laundry van. It’s February 1980 and he has just come from lunch with Francois Mitterrand. Barthes dies soon afterwards. History tells us it was an accident. 
 
But what if it were an assassination? What if Barthes was carrying a document of unbelievable, global importance? A document explaining the seventh function of language – an idea so powerful it gives whoever masters it the ability to convince anyone, in any situation, to do anything. 
 
Police Captain Jacques Bayard and his reluctant accomplice Simon Herzog set off on a chase that takes them from the corridors of power to backstreet saunas and midnight meetings. What they discover is a worldwide conspiracy involving the President, murderous Bulgarians and a secret international debating society.

HHhH

An astonishing, unforgettable novel: a thrilling Second World War assassination plot told with rare literary brilliance.

[An] extraordinary true story... made still better by the way in which Laurent Binet weaves in his own exploits as researcher and detective to uncover the truth

HHhH is a highly original piece of work, at once charming, moving, and gripping

HHhH blew me away. Binet’s style fuses it all together: a neutral, journalistic honesty sustained with a fiction writer’s zeal and story-telling instincts. It’s one of the best historical novels I’ve ever come across.

Magnificent ... unsurpassable ... told with grace and elegance ... exerts a hypnotic sway over the reader ... something of a Greek tragedy and of the splendid thriller ... All the details have such persuasive force that they remain indelibly recorded in the memory of the reader

By the time I got to the last page of Binet's masterpiece, I had to close my eyes and rethink history. I'm rethinking it still

Laurent Binet has given a new dimension to the non-fiction novel by weaving his writerly anxieties about the genre into the narrative, but his story is no less compelling for that, and the climax is unforgettable

A wonderful, ambitious book, and a triumph of translation

A suspenseful work of absolute originality

A great success ... a terrifying story ... a breathless thriller

HHhH is an astonishing book—absorbing, moving, for the agony and acuity with which its author engages the problem of making literary art from unbearable historical fact.

Extraordinary first novel...a literary triumph...The book's final section, which recounts the assassination and subsequent manhunt in minute detail, is a masterpiece of tension, and its closing pages are extremely moving. Very few page-turners come as smart and original as this

Mindblowing...obsessed with the past but gleaming with radical innovation, it's urgent and new and terrifying and beautiful and pretty much the best thing that's happened in fiction for ages

Binet has created something fresh and original and at times funny (no easy task given the subject matter) making a historical tale which captures the imagination and is also an important read

Utterly compelling and ruthlessly fascinating

A thrilling story that also happens to be true, by a gifted young author... Binet manages it all with beautiful lucidity and...discreet storytelling mastery

A gripping thriller and a moving testament to the heroes of the Czechoslovakian resistance. Their mission resets the path of history. Binet’s resets the path of the historical novel. He has a bright, bright future.

An engrossing literary experiment that still contains enough hard facts to function as a terrific yarn.

Thrilling and engaging...Binet brilliantly builds the tension in the lead up to the assassination attempt, likewise the nerve-shredding aftermath of the incident.... Being so experimental yet so compelling as a writer is a real high-wire act, one only precious few authors have managed. Binet does it dazzlingly here, and I'm excited about what he's going to write next

Mesmeric stuff; history brought to chilling, potent life

Binet’s debut is a masterpiece of historical fiction… gripping read

A nail-biting novel, a thorough work of history and, most successfully of all, an exercise in form: a story about the writing of a true story

Binet's approach may be new, but his story-telling instincts are nicely old fashioned. Translator Sam Wood does justice to the lucid prose

Is it a novel about the Nazis? Or is it a memoir about a historian trying to write about the Nazis? Somehow, it’s both – and it’s brilliant

A must-read for people who have a real interest in the Third Reich … improbably entertaining and electrifyingly modern, a moving work

With its slightly skewed perspective and the relative freshness of its approach, HHhH compels us once again to consider that this, surely, was humanity's lowest point: a war waged, not against those who thwarted Germany's territorial ambitions, but against all that was good and decent in the human soul. In so doing, it confounds those who would decry post-modernism as wilfully obscure, relativistic and lacking in conviction

French newcomer Laurent Binet hits the ground running in the engrossing novel within a novel

A breezily charming novel, with a thrilling story that also happens to be true, by a gifted young author amusingly anguished over the question of how to tell it … In principle there's nothing not to like about Laurent Binet's acclaimed debut, and HHhH is certainly a thoroughly captivating performance

This book fully justifies the lavish praise adorning its author

Binet provides both context and impressive detail on the eventual assassination of Heydrich

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER 
 
Two men have been enlisted to kill the head of the Gestapo. This is Operation Anthropoid, Prague, 1942: two Czechoslovakian parachutists sent on a daring mission by London to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich - chief of the Nazi secret services, 'the hangman of Prague', 'the blond beast', 'the most dangerous man in the Third Reich'. His boss is Heinrich Himmler but everyone in the SS says 'Himmler's brain is called Heydrich', which in German spells HHhH. 
 
HHhH is a panorama of the Third Reich told through the life of one outstandingly brutal man, a story of unbearable heroism and loyalty, revenge and betrayal. It is a moving and shattering work of fiction. 
Laurent Binet's highly anticipated new novel, The Seventh Function of Language, is available for pre-order now...

Laurent Binet

Characteristically ambitious, brilliant... Combining all the pleasure of a period romp with vital questions about our shared origin stories... a triumph

A hugely entertaining novel, taking delight in its own twists and turns

Spectator on THE 7TH FUNCTION OF LANGUAGE

Lively, earthy, experimental, ambitious, clever and endlessly entertaining... Smart, witty, direct, cool

The Times Literary Supplement on THE 7TH FUNCTION OF LANGUAGE

Florence, New Year’s Day 1557. As dawn breaks, a painter is discovered lying on the floor of a church, stabbed through the heart. 
 
Above him, the paintings he laboured over for more than a decade. At his home, a hidden painting scandalously depicting Maria de Medici, daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Florence, as a naked Venus. Who is the murderer? Who is behind the painting? As the city erupts in chaos, Giorgio Vasari, the great art historian, is picked to lead the investigation. 
 
Letters fly back and forth carrying news of political plots and speculation about the killer’s identity – between Maria and her aunt Catherine de’ Medici, the queen of France; between Catherine and her scheming agents in Florence; and between Vasari and his friend Michelangelo. Meanwhile, the Pope is banning books and branding works of art immoral. And the truth, when it comes to light, is as shocking as the bold new artworks that have made Florence the red-hot centre of Europe. 
 
Bursting with characters and colour, Perspectives is a mystery like no other that shows us Renaissance Florence as we’ve never seen it before – a dazzling, hugely entertaining novel of court machinations, murder and art.

Laurent Binet

Praise for Perspectives

One of the most successful French writers of his generation... a wild romp of a book that turns history on its head

Glorious, funny and profound

A bold and thrilling experiment in counter-factual history from a masterful storyteller

One of the most successful French writers of his generation... a wild romp of a book that turns history on its head

Glorious, funny and profound

A bold and thrilling experiment in counter-factual history from a masterful storyteller

One of the most successful French writers of his generation... a wild romp of a book that turns history on its head

Glorious, funny and profound

A bold and thrilling experiment in counter-factual history from a masterful storyteller

Books by Laurent Binet

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter