Michel Houellebecq

The gloriously moving and extravagantly filthy cult classic from the internationally bestselling author of Submission. Half-brothers Michel and Bruno have a mother in common but little else. Michel is a molecular biologist, a thinker and idealist, a man with no erotic life to speak of and little in the way of human society. Bruno, by contrast, is a libertine, though...

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...

Submission is the highly-anticipated new novel from the internationally bestselling French writer Michel Houellebecq. As the 2022 French Presidential election looms, two candidates emerge as favourites: Marine Le Pen of the Front National, and the charismatic Muhammed Ben Abbes of the growing Muslim Fraternity. Forming a controversial alliance with the political left to block the Front National's alarming ascendency, Ben...

Part thriller, part satire, the critically acclaimed latest novel by the winner of the Prix Goncourt is quintessential Houellebecq and perhaps his best yet. Artist Jed Martin emerges from a ten-year hiatus with good news. It has nothing to do with his broken boiler, the approach of another lamentably awkward Christmas dinner with his father or the memory of his...

Who, among you, deserves eternal life? The Possibility of an Island by Michel Houellebecq revolves around Daniel, a highly successful stand-up comedian who has made a career out of playing outrageously on the prejudices of his public. However, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, he has begun to detest laughter in particular and mankind in general. Despite this, Daniel...

Annihilation was a Daily Express Book of the Year. 'The most important novelist to have been publishing in all of Europe over the past three decades' - The Sunday Times 'An extended meditation on human frailty and the lack of spirituality in the Western world... Houellebecq displays compassion and empathy, and a belief in the redemptive power of love' -...

The death of God in the West was the prelude to a metaphysical soap opera that continues to this day. Christianity’s masterstroke was to combine a fierce belief in the individual with the promise of eternal participation in the Absolute. When that dream evaporated, various attempts were made to offer the individual a minimum of being. The latest of these...

The death of God in the West was the prelude to a metaphysical soap opera that continues to this day. Christianity’s masterstroke was to combine a fierce belief in the individual with the promise of eternal participation in the Absolute. When that dream evaporated, various attempts were made to offer the individual a minimum of being. The latest of these...

Just thirty, with a well-paid job, no love life, and a terrible attitude, the anti-hero of this grim, funny novel smokes four packs of cigarettes a day and writes weird animal stories in his spare time. A computer programmer by day, he is tolerably content, until he's packed off with a colleague — the sexually frustrated Raphael Tisserand — to...

Best-selling French novelist Michel Houellebecq pays tribute to the master of horror, H. P. Lovecraft. Part biographical sketch, part pronouncement on existence and literature, the best-selling French novelist Michel Houellebecq's H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, was published in France in 1991 and is the first non-fiction text ever published by the author. Here, France's most famous contemporary...

The work of Michel Houellebecq – one of the most widely read and controversial novelists of our time – is marked by the thought of Schopenhauer. When Houellebecq came across a copy of Schopenhauer's Aphorisms in a library in his mid-twenties, he was bowled over by it and he hunted down a copy of his major philosophical work, The World...