It was a French election that made the author's name well-known across the world.

Submission, one of his latest novels, describes what happens in the future 2022 election when the pro-Islam party gets elected to government against the National Front

Submission is another term for Islam but in this case the submission is not of human beings with regards to God but the submission of the people of France to Islam.

The book was published on 7 January 2015, the same day of the Charlie Hebdo shooting. Already twice accused in court of islamophobia and twice found not guilty, the author's Submission does not feature acts of terrorism and eventually presents conversion to Islam as an attractive choice for the protagonist, a typically "houellebecquian" middle-aged man with a fixation for young women.

Born Michel Thomas in 1956 on the French island of Reunion, the author was abandoned by his mother who followed her boyfriend to Brazil, and was brought up by his grandmothers.

To his admirers he is France's biggest literary export and some say the greatest living writer. His detractors say he is a peddler who writes vulgar sleazy literature.

A chance offhand remark led to him being taken to court for inciting racial hatred which led to him relocating to Ireland for some years.

His first book was a biographical essay on the horror writer HP Lovecraft. His first novel, Whatever was published in 1994. His next one, Atomised, was published in 1998 and brought him international fame as well as controversy.

Platform followed in 2001 and several books of poetry including The Art of Struggle, in 1996.

In 2010 he published The Map and the Territory which won the prestigious Prix Goncourt.

The book being reviewed, Serotonin, was published in January 2019 and has as one of its main themes a violent revolt by desperate farmers, with echoes of the Yellow Vests (Gilets Jaunes) riots over the past months.

This was followed by Destroy, centring on the 2027 French election.

Serotonin is a vision of degraded masculinity. Dissatisfied and discontent, Florent-Claude Labrouste feels he is dying of sadness. His young girlfriend hates him and his career as an engineer at the Ministry of Agriculture is pretty much over.

His only relief comes in the form of a pill - white, oval, small. Recently released for public consumption, Captorix is a new brand of antidepressant which works by altering the brain's release of serotonin.

Armed with this new drug, Labrouste decides to abandon his life in Paris and return to the Normandy countryside where he used to work some years back promoting regional cheeses, and where he had once been in love.

But instead of happiness, he finds a rural community devastated by globalisation and European agricultural policies, and local farmers longing, like Labrouste himself, for an impossible return to what they remember as the golden age.

Serotonin is a devastating story of solitude, of longing and individual suffering as well as a powerful criticism of modern life.