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Civilisations
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
HHhH
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. All the characters in HHhH are real. All the events depicted are true. But alongside the nerve-shredding preparations for the attack runs another story: when you are a novelist writing about real people, how do you resist the temptation to make things up? 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 improbably entertaining and electrifyingly modern, a moving and shattering work of fiction.
The Seventh Function of Language
“A cunning, often hilarious mystery for the Mensa set and fans of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose and Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia.” —Heller McAlpin, NPR Paris, 1980. The literary critic Roland Barthes dies—struck by a laundry van—after lunch with the presidential candidate François Mitterand. The world of letters mourns a tragic accident. But what if it wasn’t an accident at all? What if Barthes was . . . murdered? In The Seventh Function of Language, Laurent Binet spins a madcap secret history of the French intelligentsia, starring such luminaries as Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Julia Kristeva—as well as the hapless polic...
Imperial Bedrooms
In this follow-up to his bestselling debut novel, Imperial Bedrooms sees Bret Easton Ellis reuinite with the privileged teenagers of his debauched Los Angeles, as they enter middle age. Clay is a successful screenwriter, middle-aged and disaffected; he’s in LA to cast his new movie. However, this trip is anything other than professional. Soon, he's drifting through a louche and long-familiar circle – a world largely populated by the band of infamous teenagers first introduced in Bret Easton Ellis's first novel Less Than Zero. After a meeting with a gorgeous but talentless actress determined to win a role in his movie, Clay finds himself connected with Kelly Montrose, a producer whose gruesomely violent death is suddenly very much the talk of the town. As his degenerate reverie is interrupted by a violent plot for revenge, his seemingly endless proclivity for betrayal and exploitation looks set to land him somewhere darker and more ominous than ever before.
Civilizations
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 novel by one of Europe’s most exciting writers. C. 1000 CE: 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, Christophe...
The 7th Function of Language
'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.
Perspectives
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 sch...
The Passenger
'Gripping' - Telegraph 'Brilliant' - Sunday Times 'Riveting' - Guardian The devastating rediscovered classic written from the horrors of Nazi Germany, as one Jewish man attempts to flee persecution in the wake of Kristallnacht BERLIN, NOVEMBER 1938. With storm troopers battering against his door, Otto Silbermann must flee out the back of his own home. He emerges onto streets thrumming with violence: it is Kristallnacht, and synagogues are being burnt, Jews rounded up and their businesses destroyed. Turned away from establishments he had long patronised, betrayed by friends and colleagues, Otto finds his life as a respected businessman has dissolved overnight. Desperately trying to conceal his Jewish identity, he takes train after train across Germany in a race to escape this homeland that is no longer home. Twenty-three-year-old Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz wrote The Passenger at breakneck speed in 1938, fresh in the wake of the Kristallnacht pogroms, and his prose flies at the same pace. Shot through with Hitckcockian tension, The Passenger is a blisteringly immediate story of flight and survival in Nazi Germany.
Perspective(s)
A pulse-quickening murder mystery set in Renaissance Florence by the renowned author of HHhH. As dawn breaks over the city of Florence on New Year’s Day 1557, Jacopo da Pontormo is discovered lying on the floor of a church, stabbed through the heart. Above him are the frescoes he labored over for more than a decade—masterpieces all, rivaling the works of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel. When guards search his quarters, they find an obscene painting of Venus and Cupid—with the face of Venus replaced by that of Maria de’ Medici, the Duke of Florence’s oldest daughter. The city erupts in chaos. Who could have committed these crimes: murder and lèse-majesté? Giorgio Vasari, the gr...
A=-A
A=-A is a beautiful, dark and surreal story, about a man called Alpha whose world is quite literally turned upside down for a day. As he wanders the streets of his hometown, reality flips on its axis, sending him and the reader on a wild and extraordinary journey. This wholly immersive, escapist, psychedelic mystery centres around two profound philosophical questions: in a strange and unreliable world, can we be certain of anything? And if we stop craving certainty - and entertain doubt - what new possibilities become available to us? 'Gloriously odd, deeply moving . . . In short: a trip.' - Niall Griffiths, winner of the Wales Book of the Year 2020
