This is a book that feels frantically in search of its own narrative thread

Emmanuel Carrère's new book is an attempt to tell a story with a good ending about France ’s national crisis of 2015 .

V13, published in France in 2022 and now in English translation, collects the columns he filed for the French weekly L’Obs from the trial of 20 men accused of involvement in the November 2015 attacks.

Michel Houellebecq’s Submission was released on 7 January 2015 , by diabolical coincidence the same day as the Charlie Hebdo attacks.

The novel imagines a Muslim takeover of France via a 2022 presidential election in which the left forms an alliance with Islamists to block the far right.

French writer Philippe Carrère 's best work emerges from his sometimes queasy identification with individual men and women.

He is as frequently accused of solipsism as he is praised for his spooky perceptiveness about other people.

Carrère and Louis share a habit of compulsive introspection, but nothing could be more alien to Carrère than Louis’s broad structural vision.