Vincenzo Vega Books

Sweeping, clever, heartbreaking and memorable. The perfect summer read Henrietta Richman Grazia 20170522

A controversial, intelligent, and mordantly funny new novel from France’s most famous living literary figure It’s 2022. François is bored. He’s a middle-aged lecturer at the New Sorbonne University and an expert on J. K. Huysmans, the famed nineteenth-century novelist associated with the Decadent movement. But François’s own decadence is of considerably smaller scale. He sleeps with his students, eats microwave dinners, and watches YouPorn. Meanwhile, it’s election season, and in an alliance with the Socialists, France’s new Islamic party sweeps to power—and Islamic law is instituted. Women are veiled, polygamy is encouraged, and François is offered an irresistible academic advancement—on the condition that he converts to Islam. A darkly comic masterpiece from one of France’s great writers, Submission by Michel Houellebecq has become an international sensation and one of the most discussed novels of our time.

Alex Garland's international bestseller, The Beach, received extraordinary praise, and his writing was compared to Hemingway, Greene, Conrad, Golding, and Huxley. His new novel, The Tesseract, is a bold departure from The Beach, and demonstrates the enormous range of Garland's talent. The Tesseract is a Chinese puzzle of a novel, beautifully written and suspensefully crafted. Set in the Philippines and spanning three generations, it follows three stories whose characters' fates are intertwined: gangsters on a chase through the streets of Manila; middle-class parents putting their children to bed in the suburbs; and a couple of street kids and the wealthy psychologist who is studying their dreams. It is a novel that balances science against religion, and our wills against our fates, asking the ever elusive question of where meaning lies.