Bøger af Laurent Binet

'One of the funniest, most riotously inventive and enjoyable novels you'll read this year' - Observer`The most outrageously entertaining novel of the year... A joy' - Philip HensherRoland Barthes is knocked down in a Paris street by a laundry van.

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'.

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.

Den franske essayist og semiolog Roland Barthes bliver i 1980 kørt ned af en varebil i Paris og udånder kort tid efter på hospitalet. Men var det bare en ulykke? Blev han i virkeligheden slået ihjel og i så fald af hvem? Barthes bar på en mappe, hvor der nu mangler et vigtigt dokument. Om den syvende sprogfunktion. En lingvistisk trylleformular med uanede muligheder for den, der behersker den. Dokumentet må findes. Den umage duo, inspektør Bayard, konservativ og pligtopfyldende, og den unge nysgerrige akademiker og lingvist Simon Herzog, bliver sat på opgaven af selveste præsident Giscard d'Estaing. Forfatteren leger med forholdet mellem virkelighed og fiktion og tegner et billede af de franske mestertænkere fra det sproglige og litterære mikrokosmos i Paris i 70'erne og 80’erne med bulgarske agenter, hemmelige sprogselskaber, bøssesaunaer, et præsidentvalg og international storpolitik som bagtæppe. Binet dissekerer elegant sprogets, ordenes og tekstens magt.

"Captivating . . . [HHhH] has a vitality very different from that of most historical fiction." -James Wood, The New YorkerThe basis for the major motion picture, "The Man with the Iron Heart " available on streaming and home video.HHhH: "Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich," or "Himmler's brain is called Heydrich." The most lethal man in Hitler's cabinet, Reinhard Heydrich seemed indestructible-until two exiled operatives, a Slovak and a Czech, killed him and changed the course of history.In Laurent Binet's mesmerizing debut, we follow Jozef Gabcík and Jan KubiS from their dramatic escape from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia to their fatal attack on Heydrich and their own brutal deaths in the basement of a Prague church. A seamless blend of memory, actuality, and Binet's own remarkable imagination, HHhH is at once thrilling and intellectually engrossing-a fast-paced novel of the Second World War that is also a profound meditation on the debt we owe to history. A Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for FictionA Financial Times Best Book of the YearA New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

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. Civilisations is a wildly entertaining counterfactual story about the modern world, colonisation, empire-building and the eternal human quest for domination.