Annihilation

Paperback

$24.99

Annihilation

$24.99

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This book is part of the The Houllebecq Collection. View the bundle and save.

★★★★★ Trusted by hundreds of readers worldwide

Houellebecq's Late Reckoning

Michel Houellebecq published Annihilation in France in January 2022. It arrived in English translation in 2024, courtesy of Shaun Whiteside, and it is the longest novel Houellebecq has written. At nearly 600 pages, it is also his most patient.

What the Book Covers

The central character is Paul Raison, a mid-level technocrat in the French Ministry of Finance. His life unfolds against two crises: a series of bizarre, almost surrealist terrorist attacks across Europe (a cargo ship scuttled, a minister's severed head displayed on a spike) and his father's catastrophic stroke, which leaves the old man locked inside his own body in a hospital bed. Paul's marriage is disintegrating. His own health begins to fail. The political thriller and the domestic novel run on parallel tracks until they converge.

Houellebecq is still Houellebecq. The prose is flat, observational, laced with statistical data and brand names. But something has shifted. Where his earlier novels were defined by contempt, Annihilation is marked by something closer to grief. The scenes of Paul caring for his dying father, and later facing his own mortality, are the most emotionally direct passages Houellebecq has ever written. Several French critics called it his most human book. That is a low bar, but they were not wrong.