Ask a Bookseller: 'Civilizations' imagines a Europe colonized by Incas and Aztecs

Sarah Brown of Zenith Bookstore in Duluth has a revisionist history to recommend. "Civilizations: a Novel," by Laurent Binet, asks: What if colonizers had traveled to Europe rather than the other way around?Binet, who is French, creates a novel in which the Inca emperor Atahualpa crosses the Atlantic to Portugal in the early 1500s. In Europe, he finds a downtrodden peasant class, plague, power battles among kings and popes — in other words, a world that's ripe for change. The Inca and the Aztec becomes the rulers of Europe, introducing changes to farming and religion, and becoming enmeshed in political intrigue.Brown said the novel reads as a scribe laying out this revisionist history, often with a wink and a nod that pull the reader in. Wide-ranging in scope and humorous, the novel doesn't say "any civilization is better than another," says Brown. "Just 'what if?'"