Serotonin

LONGLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2020

Florent-Claude Labrouste is dying of sadness. Despised by his girlfriend and on the brink of career failure, his last hope for relief comes in the form of a newly available antidepressant that alters the brain’s release of serotonin.

When he returns to the Normandy countryside in search of serenity, he instead finds a rural community left behind by globalisation and red-tape agricultural policies, with local farmers longing for an impossible return towhat they remember as a golden age.

Serotonin is at once a devastating story of solitude, longing and suffering, and a powerful criticism of modern life by one of the most provocative and prophetic writers of our age.