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Vengeance Is Mine
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman
- Length: 6 hrs and 35 mins
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Vengeance Is Mine
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Publisher's Summary
A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • The New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • From the best-selling author of Three Strong Women comes a thrilling novel about a triple homicide that dredges up unsettling memories from a lawyer’s 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 won’t be able to put it down." —Vogue
The heroine of Marie NDiaye’s new novel is Maître 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, Maître 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 can’t 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 Maître 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 Maître Susane has generously offered Sharon her professional services, the housekeeper always finds ways to evade her, claiming the marriage certificate Maître Susane requires is being held hostage. Is Sharon being honest with Maître 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 Highsmith’s 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.
What the critics say
“Sinister and spellbinding . . . Half suspense novel, half dark fairy tale, Vengeance is Mine is a literary tour-de-force.”—Literary Hub, “Most Anticipated Books of 2023”
"The unsettling Vengeance Is Mine (Knopf) from Marie NDiaye, winner of France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt, has the magnetism of a thriller and the mysteriousness of an existential riddle....This is a novel of unraveling certainties and of a middle-class life encroached upon by nightmares. You may not fully unlock its mysteries—it’s slim, a good length for a reread—but you won’t be able to put it down." —Vogue
"The novels of the French Senegalese [Marie] NDiaye are at once dense and capacious; the work of her longtime English-language translator Jordan Stump powerfully conveys the mesmeric quality of her prose...Few can write abstraction with such precision, so that what is hidden from the self is more telling and more powerful than what is revealed."—Katie Kitamura, The Atlantic