(Paris) The publisher Flammarion announced on Wednesday the publication of a new novel by Michel Houellebecq, one of the most translated French-speaking authors and the most sold abroad, on January 7, without disclosing the title or the subject.
In addition to this date, the publisher indicates in a program of publications that the book will have 736 pages.
“This new novel will be released in a hardcover edition with a hard cover, with a slice and a colored bookmark,” adds Flammarion, who makes a more luxurious item than usual.
The French Minister of the Economy Bruno Le Maire had affirmed at the end of October in front of industrialists in Paris that he knew one of the themes of this book, saying he was “very close to a writer whom you all know”.
“I don’t want to make big revelations,” he said, “but I think that the next work by Michel Houellebecq […] will defend the industry ”.
Distinguished many times in France and knighted in the Legion of Honor by President Emmanuel Macron, Houellebecq is the first French novelist to be distinguished by the Austrian Prize for European Literature, in 2019, since Patrick Modiano (2012).
Flammarion is also reissuing on November 10, in the same format, three novels that made Michel Houellebecq successful, Extension of the field of wrestling (1994), Elementary particles (1998) and Platform (2001).
The last book of the French writer is called Serotonin (2019), in which he plunges his readers into the heart of a rural and suffering France, seeming to anticipate the social protest movement of “yellow vests”, which shook power in 2018.