France Revels in Sordid Tales of Barely Disguised Sarkozy Depicted in Bestseller

He also shadowboxes in front of a mirror in his presidential office and in one especially caustic passage, minutes before a public appearance, demands a sexual favour from a provincial mayor in return for giving her a subsidy for a medieval history museum.

A controversial, thinly veiled "fable" of political love and war in Sarkozy's fiefdom in the rich western suburbs of Paris is the surprise bestseller of the summer in France after it cost its author her job, infuriated Sarkozy's son, Jean, and stoked tensions in the already fractured rightwing UMP party.

Le Monarque, Son Fils, Son Fief (The Monarch, His son, His fief) by Marie-Célie Guillaume has been at the top of the French non-fiction bestseller charts for seven weeks, surprising critics and embarrassing the French right.

Its presence in summer suitcases has shown not just readers' continued appetite for the bizarre character plots that defined Sarkozy's presidency, but also that truth can sometimes be stranger than fiction.

Guillaume was head of staff for Patrick Devedjian, a one-time Sarkozy ally and minister for economic recovery, when she decided to tell all in a barely disguised roman à clef about the infighting in Sarkozy's political base in the posh western suburbs of Paris, the Hauts-de-Seine, the richest department in France.

Jean, the president's young student son, whose rise in local politics sparked allegations of nepotism, appears as "Le Dauphin" – an heir apparent desperate for attention from his absent father.

Sarkozy's easily recognisable political friends appear as self-interested, cigar-chomping, bling-obsessed and permatanned a shade of "deep caramel orange".

But the worst is reserved for Rocky himself, the Sarkozy character, who is so excited by power that he demands a sex act from a female politician who has an appointment at his office, telling her: "Look at the state I'm in, you can't leave me like this ... "

The book sparked such outrage from the Sarkozy camp in the Hauts-de-Seine that Devedjian was eventually forced to sack Guillaume as his head of cabinet. Jean Sarkozy accused Devedjian of being behind the book himself and lashed out at Guillaume for what he called a "vile and sordid tissue of lies".

She in turn argued that the writing had been an "outlet" after the horrors of political infighting in the Hauts-de-Seine. She said she wanted to show politics in its most "crude and brutal form". Asked about the Sarkozy sex scene, which his allies had dismissed as unlikely, she said she'd wanted to give an idea of power and sex that was "universal".

This mixing of the political and the literary on the summer bestseller lists is a taste of what's to come in the annual French publishing drive at the end of August. The main event of the publishing season is the first novelist-penned account of the new Socialist president, François Hollande.

After Sarkozy's 2007 invitation to the playwright Yasmina Reza to document his election campaign, Hollande followed suit this year and was trailed by a young, award-winning Parisian novelist, Laurent Binet, a favourite of his partner Valerie Trierweiler. The resulting book, Rien Ne Se Passe Comme Prevu, (Nothing Goes According To Plan) is out in August. But Binet has already taken to Twitter to bat off claims that he was asked by publishers to add more spice to the manuscript and more passages on Trierweiler.

Trierweiler's own book on the campaign – in which she wrote captions for photos by Hollande's official photographer – has been a commercial disappointment, with only 1,000 copies sold since June, the weekly L'Express reported this week.

Meanwhile, the disgraced, pariah-figure Dominique Strauss-Kahn has also inspired a books boom. Les Strauss-Kahn, an investigation by Le Monde journalists into his political life and behaviour, is at number two in the non-fiction bestsellers. In the autumn, the writer Stephane Zagdanski will publish a novel, "Chaos brúlant" (Burning Chaos), depicting the case of the alleged New York Sofitel attack through the eyes of people in a Manhattan psychiatric centre.

This article was written by Angelique Chrisafis in Paris, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 10th August 2012 12.03 Europe/London

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