Vengeance is Mine
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- £6.49
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- £6.49
Publisher Description
*A GUARDIAN BEST TRANSLATED NOVEL OF 2023*
*A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS 2023 FINALIST*
*A WORDS WITHOUT BORDERS BEST TRANSLATED BOOK OF 2023*
"A powerful story of mothers and daughters" Guardian
"A haunting, mysterious tour de force" Lucy Scholes, Prospect
"I was hypnotised from the first word to the last" Tess Gunty, author of The Rabbit Hutch
"[A] fiercely intelligent story: everyone is complex and full of shadows, as life is" Mariana Enríquez, author of The Dangers of Smoking in Bed
When Gilles Principaux walks into Maître Susane's legal practice seeking representation for his wife, his presence triggers memories from her childhood she had long buried. Gilles' wife is charged with drowning their three children, a case that will be splashed across the news media in Bordeaux and beyond. So why has he entrusted his wife's fate to her small, unremarkable practice?
Maître Susane can't shake the feeling that she has met him before, that something happened between them one afternoon when she was barely ten and he was fourteen, something sinister she has never known how to remember. But Gilles seems so at ease her in presence that Maître Susane begins to believe that her memory must be playing tricks on her.
Haunted by a past that both escapes and consumes her, Maître Susane fights to hold on to her memory, her identity and the chance she's been given to avenge herself.
Translated from the French by Jordan Stump.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ndiaye's magnetic and intense latest (after That Time of Year) follows a French lawyer's downward spiral when she takes on a sensationalized murder case. Maître Susane, 42, is an undistinguished lawyer in Bordeaux whose life is upended when Gilles Principaux asks her to defend his wife, Marlyne, for the murder of their three children. Further complicating matters for Maître Susane is her housekeeper, Sharon, an undocumented Mauritian living in France with her husband and children: Maître Susane feels uncomfortable being her employer and so spares her such tasks as cleaning the toilet, and yet Sharon seems to dislike her, even, on one occasion, going as far as pretending not to see Maître Susane in a supermarket. Ndiaye's incendiary premise is really a jumping-off point to track her protagonist's roiling inner world: at one point, Maître Susane refuses to look at herself in the mirror, certain that "she wasn't feeling strong enough to choose between the rational woman and the woman who wasn't, but often understood things more rightly." The author is equally adept at both small-scale psychological character insight and virtuosic structural shifts—the highlight of the novel is a harrowing, unforgettable 10-page monologue that Marlyne delivers from behind bars. Ndiaye turns in another ferocious tale.
