Vengeance is Mine

A novel of concentric haunting, summoning ghosts into the room with prose that shimmers, cuts, and sings. Unflinching and restrained, Vengeance is Mine sails its readers into uncharted psychological waters. I was hypnotised from the first word to the last -- Tess Gunty, author of The Rabbit Hutch
In this disquieting, quietly beautiful novel, Marie NDiaye writes about an unimaginable crime placing around it a world of confusion, trauma, and memories of a past that cannot be trusted. There's more questions than answers in this fiercely intelligent story: everyone is complex and full of shadows, as life is -- Mariana Enríquez, author of Our Share of Night
NDiaye balances external and internal revelations to create a powerful story of mothers and daughters, and of what happens when a parent's unconditional love breaks down -- John Self * Guardian *
[NDiaye] is a master at agitating, probing and upending expectations...In 'Vengeance Is Mine,' NDiaye circles a familiar configuration of ideas: trauma and memory, class anxiety, isolation and otherness, the warped savagery of domestic life, the rupture between parents and their children. But she also considers the texture of justice - what it means, how it's determined and who enacts it...Appreciating this moody, sensual and sometimes feverish prose requires submission - to the grooves of language, the performance of storytelling -- Lovia Gyarkye * New York Times Book Review *
The magnificence of [NDiaye's] writing, in all its shocks of perception, makes you feel that by rights her name should come with the same pantheonic glow that attends, say, Annie Ernaux or Elena Ferrante -- Hermione Hoby * 4Columns *
The central ideas in "Vengeance Is Mine" are, thrillingly, as difficult to pin down as the identities of its characters. In one light, it's a scathing look at the simmering desperation provoked by France's rigid structures of authority and power. But it's also an uber-feminist rewriting of a plot made familiar by texts from "Medea" to Leïla Slimani's bestseller "The Perfect Nanny" (2018) [published as "Lullaby" in the UK], in which oppression, writ large, drives a woman to horrifying violence against the children in her care. And, read in a less outraged mood, it's just a quiet book about a quiet woman, quietly fragmenting - no more, no less...[NDiaye] is a poet of uncertainty. Her ability to simultaneously embody all the fractured parts of a character's mind makes aspects of Susane's spiral that might otherwise seem unbelievable - can she really not know whether she is the mother of Rudy's child? - come across as engrossingly, utterly human * Washington Post *
In her novels, Ndiaye plunges her characters, usually women, into a visceral experience of difference, often without naming what that difference is... her texts still inspire a paranoia about how to read her protagonists, catching us in a game of complicity * Vulture, New York Magazine *
A haunting, mysterious tour de force -- Lucy Scholes * Prospect *
Vengeance Is Mine might present an answer to how the "trauma plot" - in which a character works through a damaging experience from their past - can remain fresh * Financial Times *
The result is a complex knot of guilt, fear and obsession, which compresses a great deal into 240 pages without ever seeming clotted -- John Self * Guardian *
NDiaye's award-winning writing is dreamy, elusive, and brilliant, shifting genres and forms...Vengeance is Mine is, to my mind, one of NDiaye's very best novels, with a devastating plot and a continual sense of surprise. It rewards repeat reading and careful attention -- Adam Dalva * Words Without Borders *
NDiaye's award-winning writing is dreamy, elusive, and brilliant, shifting genres and forms...Vengeance is Mine is, to my mind, one of NDiaye's very best novels, with a devastating plot and a continual sense of surprise. It rewards repeat reading and careful attention -- Adam Dalva * Words Without Borders *