Vengeance is Mine

Marie NDiaye was born in France in 1967. She published her first novel at seventeen, and has won the Prix Femina (Rosie Carpe in 2001) and the Prix Goncourt (Three Strong Women, 2009). Her play Papa Doit Manger has been taken into the repertoire of the Comédie Française. In 2007, after the election of Nicolas Sarkozy, NDiaye left France with her family to live in Berlin.

When Gilles Principaux walks into Maître Susane's law office 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 and the media are circling around what will be one of the biggest trials in Bordeaux. So why has he chosen the small legal practice of a lawyer he seems not to recognise? 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 that she has never known how to remember.

As she works on one of the biggest cases of her career, her own sense of what is true and not true and the fallibility of her memory will draw her into an uneasy reckoning with her past.

A powerful and disturbing novel by the author of Three Strong Women and Ladivine.

Translated from the French by Jordan Stump.