Vengeance Is Mine: A novel

The New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Longlisted for the NBCC Barrios Book in Translation Prize From the best-selling author of Three Strong Women comes a thrilling novel about a triple homicide that dredges up unsettling memories from a lawyers childhood. A Best Book of the Year: The New Yorker, TIME, The Washington Post, The Guardian, CrimeReads, and Words Without Borders "[NDiaye] is a master at agitating, probing and upending expectations." Lovia Gyarkye, The New York Times Book Review "You wont be able to put it down." Vogue The heroine of Marie NDiayes new novel is Matre Susane, a quiet middle-aged lawyer living a modest existence in Bordeaux, known to all as a consummate and unflappable professional. But when Gilles Principaux shows up at her office asking her to defend his wife, who is accused of a horrific crime, Matre Susane begins to crack. She seems to remember having been alone with him in her youth for a significant event, one her mind obsesses over but cant quite reconstruct. Who is this Gilles Principaux? And why would he come to her, a run-of-the-mill lawyer, for such an important trial? While this mystery preoccupies Matre Susane, at home she is increasingly concerned about Sharon, her faithful but peculiar housekeeper. Sharon arrived from Mauritius with her husband and children, and she lacks legal residency in France. But while Matre Susane has generously offered Sharon her professional services, the housekeeper always finds ways to evade her, claiming the marriage certificate Matre Susane requires is being held hostage. Is Sharon being honest with Matre Susane, or is something more sinister going on? Told in a slow seethe recalling the short novels of Elena Ferrante and the psychological richness of Patricia Highsmiths work, Vengeance Is Mine is a dreamlike portrait of a woman afflicted by failing memories and a tortured uncertainty about her own past that threatens to become her undoing.