Annihilation

""[Annihilation] is a book about discovering the ties that bind and about letting yourself be bound by them. Filled with acceptance if not serenity, it has the happiest ending you can have in a book by a writer who doesn't believe in happiness."" --John Powers, NPR ""More than a meditation on existential melancholy. [Annihilation] also holds up a mirror to contemporary France, this time in a presidential-election year and in unexpected ways."" --The Economist ""On a deeper level, Houellebecq seems to be confronting the Raison family with death mostly so that he can show us their love for one another--and their dependence on religious belief for, if not happiness, at least consolation . . . Truly impressive in its scope and humanity yet also strangely tranquil, almost sedated, as if it was written in the lotus position."" --Trevor Merrill, Compact ""Michel Houellebecq has crafted a thrilling and terrifying look into social instability and the lives it puts at risk."" --Michael Welch, Chicago Review of Books ""Both a writer whose instincts are old-fashioned . . . and radically of the moment, willing to expose the sordid, despairing interiority of much of first-world private life . . . This is what Houellebecq, at his best, does: hook the reader with a portrait of a man's limitations only to put him through a series of narrative paces that march him to an end -- end of life, end of prospects, end of story -- and elicit the compassion necessary to see him for more than his glaring shortcomings."" --Wyatt Mason, The New York Times ""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