LONGLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2020
A powerful criticism of modern life by one of the most provocative and prophetic writers of our age
Florent-Claude Labrouste is dying of sadness. Despised by his girlfriend and on the brink of career failure, his last hope for relief comes in the form of a newly available antidepressant that alters the brain's release of serotonin.
When he returns to the Normandy countryside in search of serenity, he instead finds a rural community left behind by globalisation and red-tape agricultural policies, with local farmers longing for an impossible return towhat they remember as a golden age.
'Despite its provocations, this is a novel of romantic and sorrowful ideas: Houellebecq as troubadour, singing lost loves' Rachel Kushner
Michel Houellebecq has good claim to be the most interesting novelist of our times. . . Exhilarating in its nihilism, often very funny and always enjoyable' Evening Standard
A powerful criticism of modern life by one of the most provocative and prophetic writers of our age
Florent-Claude Labrouste is dying of sadness. Despised by his girlfriend and on the brink of career failure, his last hope for relief comes in the form of a newly available antidepressant that alters the brain's release of serotonin.
When he returns to the Normandy countryside in search of serenity, he instead finds a rural community left behind by globalisation and red-tape agricultural policies, with local farmers longing for an impossible return towhat they remember as a golden age.
'Despite its provocations, this is a novel of romantic and sorrowful ideas: Houellebecq as troubadour, singing lost loves' Rachel Kushner
Michel Houellebecq has good claim to be the most interesting novelist of our times. . . Exhilarating in its nihilism, often very funny and always enjoyable' Evening Standard
Exhilarating in its nihilism, often very funny and always enjoyable... Serotonin burns with anger... [Michel Houellebecq is] the most interesting novelist of our times' Evening Standard
Michel Houellebecq has good claim to be the most interesting novelist of our times ... Houellebecq has often shown alarming prescience in his fiction ... The novel burns with anger ... Cutting between brand names and sweeping generalisations, exhilarating in its nihilism, often very funny and always enjoyable ... Yet the anger he expresses here about the destruction of the deep France that he loves could not be more to the point, reflecting deep despair about what is happening now. There's no British equivalent to Houellebecq. After years of being shunned by the French establishment, he has now been fully embraced by it. On New Year's Day, he was awarded the Légion d'honneur. Just so. Evening Standard