In his new work, Michel Houellebecq combines erotic provocation with a terrifying vision of a world teetering between satiety and fanaticism, to create one of the most shocking, hypnotic, and intelligent novels in years.

In his early forties, Michel Renault skims through his days with as little human contact as possible. But following his father’s death, he takes a group holiday to Thailand where he meets a travel agent—the shyly compelling Valérie—who begins to bring this half-dead man to life with sex of escalating intensity and audacity.

Arcing with dreamlike swiftness from Paris to Pattaya Beach and from sex clubs to a terrorist massacre, Platform is a brilliant, apocalyptic masterpiece by a man who is widely regarded as one of the world’s most original and daring writers.

Endgame & Act Without Words is a brilliant work by Samuel Beckett, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. This play is a pinnacle of Beckett's characteristic raw minimalism, offering a pure and devastating distillation of the human essence in the face of approaching death.

Originally written in French and translated into English by Beckett himself, Endgame is considered by many critics to be his greatest single work. Four characters engage in a game of life, concluding with the exit of one character and the immobility of the remaining three, in a profound study of man's relationship to his fellows.

In her most famous novel, Simone de Beauvoir does not flinch in her look at Parisian intellectual society at the end of the Second World War. Drawing on those who surrounded her — Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Arthur Koestler — and her passionate love affair with Nelson Algren, Beauvoir dissects the emotional and philosophical currents of her time.

At once an engrossing drama and an intriguing political tale, The Mandarins is the emotional odyssey of a woman torn between her inner desire and her public life.