The News Minute | January 16, 2015 | 12.22 pm ISTIn the wake of the attacks on journalists and others working at French magazine Charlie Hebdo, sales of books relating to the magazine or its cartoonists have shot up. There is one book however, which has left the others far behind.According to The Guardian, Michel Houellebecq’s controversial new novel Soumission is the book that has become a best seller.Set in 2022, the book envisions the head of France’s Islamic party Mohammed ben Abbes as the president of the country. Women are veiled in public, schools have Islamic curriculum.Published on January 7, the day the Charlie Hebdo office was attacked, it sold 1,20,000 copies in just five days, The Guardian reports. The book as generated some amount of debate in France, with several people saying that France was not an intolerant country. Many have criticized the book’s author Houellebecq for playing the mischief-monger, arguing that the book was attempting to whip up irrational directed at Muslims and was also anti-immigrant.The Guardian quotes the author as saying: “Perhaps I hadn’t read it with enough care. Now I think that a reasonably honest interpretation of the Qu’ran does not end up with jihadism. It would require a very dishonest interpretation to arrive at jihadism.”Tweet