Michel Houellebecq is a novelist, a poet, and an essayist, as well as an occasional actor, filmmaker, and singer. Acclaimed both in his native France and worldwide, his novels include Atomised, Platform, The Map and the Territory, and Submission. Shaun Whiteside is a Northern Irish translator of French, Dutch, German, and Italian literature. He has translated many novels, including Manituana and Altai by Wu Ming, The Weekend by Bernhard Schlink, and Magdalene the Sinner by Lilian Faschinger, which won him the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for German Translation in 1997.
""I can't think of a contemporary novelist anywhere whose work reflects the mood of the times so acutely [Houellebecq] seems to anticipate events; or any other writer who is so willing to show us the world as he sees it, not as we'd like it to be."" --Melanie McDonagh, The Evening Standard ""A compassionate, deeply affecting novel about love and death and the way we treat the dying . . . A novel of massive ambition, worthy of Balzac, deeply embedded in the reality of France, telling truths that come, in the end, straight from Pascal."" --David Sexton, The Spectator ""Annihilation may present itself as a political thriller, but at its heart is a far more intimate catastrophe . . . In the end, Annihilation leans neither towards hope nor despair, but towards a transcendent serenity--an eerie peace that arises, as everything arises in this novel, in the space to which warring forces give shape."" --Sam Byers, The Guardian ""I like to think Houellebecq is an optimist deep down, and this new novel supports my gut feeling . . . but there's still plenty of his trademark black-humored venom . . . The final part of the book is a deeply poignant, theistically suggestive masterpiece."" --Oskar Osprey, Artforum ""[Houellebecq] has become an undisputed literary titan . . . [In Annihilation] we're given Houellebecq at his most tender-hearted and vulnerable . . . Politics, the conspiracy at the heart of the book, all the rest of it--everything fades away. And all that's left, all that matters, is embracing the one you love."" --Camilla Grudova, The Telegraph