The Witch

by Marie NDiaye

In a small French town, a mediocre witch trapped in a cruel marriage cries watery tears of blood as she passes on her gifts to her twin daughters, who soon must make a choice: stay close to the nest and the mother who nourished them, or soar away from the dead-end claustrophobia their selfish father has imposed?

Lucie comes from a long line of witches, with powers passed down from mother to daughter. Many of them have hidden or repressed their gifts to appease disgusted or fearful men. But against the wishes of her controlling husband, Lucie initiates her twins into their family’s peculiar womanhood when they reach the age of twelve. In a few short months, Maud and Lise are crying rich crimson tears, their powers quickly becoming more potent than their mother’s, opening them to liberation and euphoria beyond what Lucie and her foremothers ever considered.

Equal parts dreamlike and disquieting, The Witch tells a tale as old as time, with a dark twist: Without looking back, children fly the nest, laying bare the tenuous threads of family that have long threatened to snap. With simmering tension and increasing panic, NDiaye’s latest novel in English captures the terror and precarity of motherhood and marriage, and the uncertainty of slowly realizing that your progeny are more dangerous—to the world and to your heart—and freer than you ever could have dreamed.

Genres: Fiction, Fantasy, Literary Fiction, France, Witches, Horror, French Literature

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Marie NDiaye was born in Pithiviers, France, in 1967; spent her childhood with her French mother (her father was Senegalese); and studied linguistics at the Sorbonne. She started writing when she was twelve or thirteen years old and was only eighteen when her first work was published. In 2001 she was awarded the prestigious Prix Femina literary prize for her novel Rosie Carpe, and in 2009, she won the Prix Goncourt for Three Strong Women.

Reviews

[Meike · Rating 2 out of 5]

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026
This short novel starts with an interesting set up: An average housewife has two children, her marriage is not particularly happy (her parents also have a marital crisis), nothing much happens in her life - except that she's, you know: A witch. NDiaye works with the opposition of the normal, the average, with the supernatural. But even the supernatural layer of the world is not fair: For some reason, the magical powers of the two daughters are much stronger than the abilities of their mother.

This is an opaque, fable-like story with dreamlike sequences, meditating on family dynamics and motherhood and feminism and privilege, and it's all so elusive that I couldn't bring myself to care about any of the characters or the themes. I also find it somewhat tragic that a novel gets nominated for an international prize honoring translated literature 30 years after its initial publication while the world is raging with war and hate - sure, there are good arguments for timeless literature, and books don't have to serve a concrete purpose, but while reading this I couldn't keep myself from wondering whether this is really the type of tale I should care about in the year 2026, whether this is what people who hardly pick up translations should read because the International Booker highlights it.

I don't think so.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shortlisted for the 2026 International Booker Prize

I found myself wordlessly pleading with my daughters not to abandon me, but their elusive, morose stares showed me they’d already gone off to a place where, with the slim resources of my labored talent, I could never go.

The Witch (2026) is Jordan Stump's translation of Marie NDiaye's La Sorcière (1996).

This is the 7th novel by Ndiaye which I've read, all in Stump's translation (see below), a wonderful author who I discovered via their first longlisting for the International Booker in 2016.

The novel is narrated by Lucie and opens with her initiating her two pubsecent 12yo twin daughters into a particular matrilineal gift of divination:

They learned quickly, both at the same speed. After eleven months the first tears of blood dripped down their cheeks on the same day, and— as I loudly enthused to conceal my emotion at this immutable proof that Maud and Lise had gained the power to see the future and the past, the latest in a whole parade of variously talented ancestresses, the oldest and perhaps the most gifted to date being my own mother— my daughters, as if already bored with it, calmly wiped their cheeks with a tissue and sighed in gladness that they’d finally come to the end of the lessons.

“No offense, Mama, but really, it’s all just so lame,” said Maud, and that was their only comment upon joining the ageless procession of occult- powered women.

But while Lucie's powers are rather feeble, allowing her to see "trivalities, nothing more", her daughters, already ruthlessly efficient in most aspects of their lives, quickly surpass her.

Meanwhile her husband, who sells timeshares across the world at a luxurious garden-club is clearly increasingly unhappy with their marriage, rather over-infatuated with one of his customers who comes to visit after he's left his own wife - this an example of the wonderfully constructed sentences that are a feature of the prose:

All through the subsequent dinner, as I realized ever more clearly that there was nothing about this man that wasn’t perfectly ordinary, and that Pierrot must meet busloads of pleasant, mannerly little men just like him at the Garden- Club, Monsieur Matin went on inspiring in my husband, and then even in Maud and Lise, such an excited, respectful curiosity that I soon understood it was leaving his wife and his child that had made Monsieur Matin a hero for my husband, who would otherwise never have looked twice at anyone so mundane.

The story, despite its commendable brevity, also features one of Lucie's neighbours, Isabelle (both ambitious for, and contemptuous of, her son); Pierrot's mother and Lucie's teenage sister-in-law; and Lucie's own parents - her mother whose powers are much stronger than hers, and her father, her parents having split up after many years of marriage.

Towards the novel's end and abandoned by her husband and her daughters, who have literally taken flight, Lucie ends up working in an academy created by Isabelle, although oddly one where she realises 'I make a better professional fake than a real witch'. Another excuse for me to showcase two sublime sentences:

Cutting each other off, desperate to be heard, dismissively mocking the others’ tales, the teachers whispered loudly as they stretched their tendinous necks over the table, holding out their long, skinny faces on which foundation made greasy beige masks that contrasted with the pallor of their napes, and in furious, hard, frantic voices recounted their harrowing poverty, fortunately behind them for now, their relentless, violent husbands gone off who knows where (and good riddance), their children in foster homes, whom they haven’t heard from, whom they nebulously vowed to take back some day, whom they’d given extraordinary, recherché names reminiscent, I thought, of the names people give puppies or kittens. And while this exchange of frantic monologues was going on at the teachers’ table, the students, on the other side of the dining hall, were calmly discussing the lessons dispensed by those same hard- luck teachers (Technique of Fervent Meditation, Therapy by Subliminal Herbs, Astral Voyages Without Turbulence, Climbing the Silver Thread), all the while voraciously downing their steamed vegetables and various grains, which seemed to do wonders for them, to contribute to the beautiful pinkness of their very taut skin, the luxuriant health of their negligently coiffed hair, while the teachers seemed more shrunken and hollowed with every mouthful, choking it down with no attempt to hide their repugnance, missing only one thing from their past, they said, meat, of which many dreamt at night and admitted that its absence was torture.

The Witch had, for me, a more playful tone that some of Ndiaye's work, almost Anne Serre style. But underneath the humour of the text, there are various serious themes at work, including that of marginality; social and familial relationships, including between genders; economic equality and inheritance; and, hinted at but not explicit, Lucie's ethnicity.

Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC

Interesting English language take on the original novel: here

Bibliography of works I've read

I also include others works in English translation which I've not got to in italics, all translated by Stump unless otherwise shown.

En famille (1991) / Among Family by Heather Doyal (1997)

Un temps de saison (1994) / That Time of Year (2020): my review

La Sorcière (1996) / The Witch (2026): my review

Rosie Carpe (2001) / Rosie Carpe by Tamsin Black (2004)

Tous mes amis, nouvelles (2004) / All My Friends (2013)

Autoportrait en vert (2005) / Self Portrait in Green (2021): my review

Mon cœur a l'etroit (2007) / My Heart Hemmed In (2009): my review

Trois femmes puissantes (2009) / Three Strong Women by John Fletcher (2013) [non-fiction]

Ladivine (2013) / Ladivine (2016): my review

La Cheffe, roman d'une cuisinière (2016) / The Cheffe (2019): my review

La vengeance m’appartient (2022) / Vengeance Is Mine (2023): my review

Booker judges' citation

‘Lucie, a long-suffering housewife, inducts her daughters into a secret practice passed down by the women in her family: witchcraft. As the two girls begin to explore their new powers, Lucie’s husband disappears, upsetting the balance of their stifling, suburban life. The language in this novel – and in Jordan Stump’s translation – is exquisite: sentences twist and transform in unexpected ways. Each character is observed with icy precision. Through Lucie’s daughters – with their nonchalant acceptance of the immense power they’re beginning to wield – the nuances of motherhood are brought into sharp focus. The Witch is pure magic.’

[Maxwell]

Lucie is a wife, a mother of twins, and a witch, albeit a mediocre one. Her skills are limited to vague images of present events that leave her with lightly blood-stained tears. But when her daughters come of age she initiates them into these mysterious powers and finds that they are quite strong in their perception, crying real tears of blood. When the girls begin to test the limits of their powers and fly the coop, Lucie reckons with the life she is left with: a mortgage, a loveless marriage, and a mission to reunite her own separated parents.

Told in long and winding, lyrically written sentences, NDiaye’s prose (and Stump’s excellent translation) creates a dreamy almost surreal atmosphere. While a majority of the story is very grounded in reality, the obvious fantastical elements woven into everyday life create an aura of mysticism and confusion that mirrors Lucie’s own experiences. In some ways it reminded me of the sort of nightmarish plottiness of Ishiguro’s novel, The Unconsoled, where events quickly unravel into the next thing and Lucie is whisked along for the ride.

However, ultimately, despite being beautifully written and offering interesting themes of motherhood, marriage, and the role that power dynamics play in both of those arenas, the story itself felt a bit underwhelming by the end. The book is quite short (only about 144 pages) and divided in 2 parts. I really enjoyed the set-up in part 1, and while I was engaged in part 2 it felt like things happened too quickly and then the ending left me wanting more.

I would definitely check out more of NDiaye’s work because I loved her prose, and perhaps reading this a second time would reveal even more layers under the surface, but overall I just liked, but didn’t love, this one.

[Flo · Rating 3 out of 5]

I guess the message is, don’t be mediocre, especially if you are a witch. But can life be something else when you choose tradition?

[Rachel Louise Atkin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this story and the voice of the main character was incredibly compelling. It just ended a bit too quickly and abruptly for me and I would have liked to discover a bit more about the characters and the daughters because I was enjoying it so much. I also loved how the reader calls into the question the very validity of what's happening and the main character's magic - this is a magical realism novel where the magic is all alluded to and passed down through the sheer belief that they are witches rather than any outright magic being used. It was quite a powerful metaphor for the bonds between women in a family. I really would recommend this novel as it certainly drew me in quickly and I loved reading it.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lucie is in a lackluster marriage and though she’s technically a witch, her powers are nothing to write home about. She can occasionally muster a glimpse into a present scene taking place elsewhere, but what’s there to see beyond the arrival of her salesman husband who will surely resent the fact that dinner is not ready? After initiating her two daughters into the powers handed down through their maternal line, Lucie finds herself left behind. Her daughters flee the nest, her husband finds himself a new family, and even her pesky neighbor leaves town for good. What’s a witch to do?

There’s a dreamlike haze to the story, with one foot set firmly in reality and the other in a world where daughters turn into crows and fathers into snails. Despite the uncanny magic that Ndiaye weaves through the story, it’s really a story of the mundane, of familial relationships, of mothers and daughters and weak and spineless men. The fantastical elements function more as a symbolic device to expose the small devastations plaguing an ordinary life: isolation, powerlessness, and domestic strife.

Ndiaye’s prose is engrossing, so verbose, but in the best way possible. Adjectives and adverbs accumulate in sentences that go on and on but retain their clarity. It’s a style I could get lost in for hours.

I'm thrilled to see that this was recognized on the 2026 IB longlist!

[Quirine · Rating 3 out of 5]

This one was a little disappointing. I liked the idea of magic as a symbol for female potential that is deliberately underused, and the way women keep themselves small to the point of self-erasure in order to be loved. Yet in reality I felt nothing reading this book. Maybe I just didn’t get it but it felt weird just for the sake of being weird and I missed a deeper layer

[Anna · Rating 2 out of 5]

I feel like I read an entirely different novel from the one the blurb suggests. The witch storyline never quite commits to the uncanny, either literal or symbolic, but rather is subdued by an emotionally opaque exploration of interiority and womanhood. It doesn’t do anything interesting with its characters either. Also, nothing bores me in fiction more than the constant mention of money.

[John Waites · Rating 2 out of 5]

I went into The Witch by Marie NDiaye expecting something sharp—an eerie, layered look at motherhood, inheritance, and power passed from one generation to the next.

That’s not what this is.

The premise is there: a mother, Lucie, meant to pass on witchcraft to her daughters—who are supposedly even more powerful. But the “witchcraft” barely shows up in any meaningful way. Instead, the story stays grounded in the mundane: a failing marriage, emotional distance, unresolved family ties. And that could’ve worked… if it actually went somewhere.

It doesn’t.

Lucie feels detached from everything—her daughters, her husband, even the more surreal moments unfolding around her. And that emotional flatness carries through the entire book. The daughters, Maud and Lise, feel underdeveloped. Their indifference never fully makes sense. Same with Pierrot’s hostility, Lucie’s passive acceptance of his disappearance, and Isabelle’s strange presence in the background. Nothing quite clicks.

There are flashes of something unsettling—something strange and promising—but they pass too quickly, like the book refuses to lean into its own idea.

What frustrated me most is that this should have been about inherited power—how it grows, mutates, maybe even becomes dangerous over time. Instead, it all lands in places that feel oddly small and uneventful.

The tone feels undecided. Is it eerie? Satirical? Emotional? It never commits.

End result: a story with a strong concept that never fully forms. It just drifts.

A disappointment—because there was something here worth exploring. It just never got there.

[City Elf Reader (Ryan) · Rating 1 out of 5]

Don’t bother.

[Stacia · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this because it made the International Booker shortlist this year. This is pretty short (basically a novella) & I read in one sitting. It was fine, I neither really liked it nor disliked it. While NDiaye's writing style is quite nice, I just didn't really connect with the story. I'm sure plenty of metaphors could be teased out of the text, but to what end? Ultimately, the story is (I guess) about motherhood & womanhood, yet I'm not quite sure what messages to take from it. Is it about different generations of women behaving differently? Ironically, it's not "like mother, like daughter" but moreso (imo) "like father, like daughter" (in that Lucie ends up in a work scandal/crime like her dad; in that the twins fly the coop like their dad). Also, this book originally came out around 30 years ago & it shows its age with fatphobia.

[Priya · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are some books that I start where I find the writing really compelling even if the content takes some work to make sense of. I usually hope that it will get easier as more of the story becomes clearer and in many cases it does.

This book, however, never made sense from start to finish. I find unlikeable characters or characters trying to find their way out of a dismal life situation interesting so Lucie, as the witch with mediocre powers, struggling to handle her even more unlikeable husband and twin daughters who seem to be far more powerful than her, initially hooked me in. The sequence of events that followed, though , were really bizarre.

From a neighbour who is highly dominating to Lucie's unexplainable obsession with reuniting her divorced parents to the behaviour of her daughters, there seemed to be multiple threads branching out on their own and never connecting back to any central theme.

If there is indeed a story here, it needs far more work than should be necessary to unearth it!

[Andy Weston · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lucie is a witch, but not a very good one. She inherited powers from her mother, but through lack of use they have faded. She does however, teach her twin teenage daughters how to use this gift, and they take to it with relish.

Meanwhile her marriage is falling apart and her husband takes off with another woman and another family, taking with him most of Lucie’s inheritance. As Lucie tries to track him down the novel takes a turn for the less predictable, and downright strange.

This isn’t a plot driven story, so those taking it on hoping for a twist or climax will be disappointed. Rather, it’s the peculiarity of the story that appeals. It’s a novel about female power, maternal identity, and family secrets. In its brevity it is evocative and evocative, with a dreamlike quality to it.

[Emily Monaco · Rating 4 out of 5]

I recently read a profile in the New York Times whose DEK dubbed Marie NDiaye "one of France’s best-known novelists,” and I was ashamed to admit that despite studying French literature and living in France for over a decade, she had somehow eluded me. I immediately headed off to the bookstore to remedy this, plucking two of the extremely prolific writer's livres de poche at random (or almost), chosen entirely for their titles. The first, La Sorcière, seemed perfect for the period leading up to Halloween, but of course the book is anything but a seasonal fantasy. Blurring realism and magic in a wholly novel way, this book explores landmarks in the lives of women and the expectations we have of ourselves and those around us, all reflecting the period in which it is both written and set: as the new millennium is quickly approaching. Ndiaye expects her readers to do a lot of the work as they read, and this indeed is part of the pleasure of reading her. I look forward to coming back to this one with a pen – and to delving into even more of the work of this writer who has embarrassingly eluded me thus far.

[Book Riot Community]

Book Riot’s Most Anticipated Books of 2026:

A witchy book in translation about a mom of twins, written by a Black woman? Did Reparations Club publish this book just for me? I'm new to NDiaye, but I can see this book introducing the prolific and award-winning novelist, playwright, and screenwriter to an even wider audience. Translated from the French, this novel set in modern France tells of a woman, a witch, a mother whose twins fly the coop upon initiation. For anyone who understands or seeks to understand the multitudes motherhood contains, this book is set up to deliver. —S. Zainab Williams

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Marie Ndiaye’s The Witch, translated by Jordan Stump, is my 13th, and final, novel from this year’s International Booker Longlist.

Lucie is a witch, descended from a long line of them. She lives in the French suburbs (Francs are still used but I’m assuming we’re in the 90s) and is trapped. Her husband irritates her, so does her neighbor and son.

When she discovers that her daughters have inherited her powers she wants them to develop them but she’s scared they’ll choose the more humdrum life of their father.

The Witch is a tiny book but has a lot of themes: the patriarchy is one: all the males in the book are weak, make fun of the women for being witches or are quick to prosecute them.

Other themes are breaking free and one could see the book as a portrait of French suburban life. In all though, history repeats itself when society comes across people who are different.

The writing is interesting- to a certain extent it’s cinematic- by this I kept imagining the book as a Claude Chabrol yet Marie Ndiaye’s sentences are long and loping, which need a small adjustment period. I did like reading it and Lucile’s utter distaste for everyone but her daughters made me laugh a bit. This was a good one to end my IB journey.

[Maricruz · Rating 2 out of 5]

No sé muy bien qué pensar de este libro. Cuando comencé a leerlo, pensé que iba a hablar sobre algo relacionado con la feminidad (los dones para la hechicería transmitidos por vía materna a las hijas, cómo cada generación de mujeres asume ese saber con distinto talante, etc). Luego me encontré, de manera nada desagradable, con una historia en que cada personaje parece ajeno por completo a los demás, encerrado cada uno en designios no solo egoístas sino un tanto disparatados. La prosa de Marie Ndiaye es prolija y bastante sensorial a ratos, nada que objetar por ahí. El problema es que a partir de determinado momento ya no se sabe hacia dónde se dirige la historia ni qué la mueve. Hay tramas que avanzan de A a B por un camino más o menos claro (camino que percibes aunque sea al llegar a su fin), y hay otras historias que consisten más bien en la presentación de una serie de escenas o peripecias concatenadas, con un fin generalmente abrupto. No soy en absoluto contraria a estas últimas, siempre y cuando me dejen, al acabar, la sensación de que me han mostrado todo lo que tenían que mostrarme. La última página de La hechicera, sin embargo, me ha dejado con un «¿ya?» que de inmediato se ha convertido en indiferencia. Ni zozobra, ni anhelo, ni mucho menos satisfacción. Na de na. Lo mismo se me escapa algo, pero en este caso no logro ni lamentarlo.

[Joy D · Rating 3 out of 5]

Main character Lucie is a witch with subpar powers. She initiates her two daughters, Maud and Lise, into the world of witches when they are twelve. They cry tears of blood, which are used as divination tools. Her husband makes off with an inheritance left to her by her father and uses it to support his "other" family. The storyline is fragmented, more a series of episodes than a narrative arc.

This novel is a bit too strange for me. I have trouble picturing witches crying tears of blood, and I tend to read these kinds of outlandish abilities as metaphors. I'm not sure what the author intended, but that interpretation is what works for me. The prose, though, is lyrical. I read the English translation from the original French, and it flowed beautifully. I would pick up another book by NDiaye for the writing alone.

[T Davidovsky · Rating 5 out of 5]

A magical story about complicated family dynamics, this book might be the most unique take I've seen on witches. It touches on all the usual topics — feminine forms of power, sisterhood, superstitions, creepy birds, and other horror elements. It's also a more observational and domestic book about class anxiety, nosy neighbors, marriage, desperate compromises, and what happens when the next generation mediates their lives through the lens of things like television. (The book was originally written in the nineties. I'm just reviewing the new English translation.)

Written with prose that is both meandering and breathless, the story follows a mother trying to raise twin witches who seem alarmingly powerful, but in short page time, the plot blooms quite a lot into something almost resembling a messy and peculiar family drama. By the end, the story basically forgets about the twin witches in favor of more broadly exploring womanhood. I recommend it if you like literary fantasy.

~Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for a Digital ARC. All opinions are my own.~

[Zana · Rating 3 out of 5]

This ended up being 95% lit fic and 5% magical realism, which wasn't what I expected. But I'll admit, I still enjoyed this novella for what it was.

Would I actually recommend this? Sure, if you're looking for something quick, depressing, and slightly whimsical.

Like other reviewers have mentioned, the prose is the strongest part of this novella. I'm not usually a huge fan of these kinds of slice of (tragic) life stories, but the author's writing style drew me in to the point where I was interested in what would happen to the FMC and her daughters. It was difficult to put the novella down. I was surprised to learn that things actually happen and the plot kept unfolding page after page. (Typically, I feel like nothing usually happens in this genre. Lit fic can be a bit navel gazey at times.)

I really wish there was more magic though. I wanted more of her daughters using their abilities because those parts were so cool. Alas, this story was focused a lot more on Lucie's life and marriage falling apart. Also, there were one too many references to fat characters being terrible or undesirable people that felt off to me.

If you're into tragedies with themes of motherhood and marriage (to horrible men), then this might be the book for you.

Thank you to Vintage and NetGalley for this arc.

[emmarps · Rating 1 out of 5]

faut vraiment que j'arrête de choisir des livres au hasard....

[Nikoleta L. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This little book made me hate two characters (I was muttering “bitch” and “asshole” every time they were on page) and despise two other characters. When I have a visceral reaction like that, especially without being overtly nudged towards it by the feelings and thoughts of the narrator, I can readily disregard minor faults and give the book a high rating. I was a bit afraid at start this would be a case of “bad men-poor women”, but luckily The Witch is much more complex than that and it delves into gender issues wholly aware of their intricacies. Something was missing, however, to make this book great. I think more magical realism would have made it great.

[jocelyn • coolgalreading · Rating 4 out of 5]

i'm stunned at the low reviews! beautifully written and compelling. i could've read 200 more pages

[victoria marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shortlisted for the 2026 International Booker Prize

“Châteauroux, Châteauroux,” I murmured, enchanted by the amber glints those three syllables threw off.

what the judges said:

Lucie, a long-suffering housewife, inducts her daughters into a secret practice passed down by the women in her family: witchcraft. As the two girls begin to explore their new powers, Lucie’s husband disappears, upsetting the balance of their stifling, suburban life. The language in this novel – and in Jordan Stump’s translation – is exquisite: sentences twist and transform in unexpected ways. Each character is observed with icy precision. Through Lucie’s daughters – with their nonchalant acceptance of the immense power they’re beginning to wield – the nuances of motherhood are brought into sharp focus. The Witch is pure magic.’

about the author:

Marie NDiaye was born in France and published her first novel at the age of 17.

Her works have 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.

Her novel Ladivine (translated into English by Jordan Stump) was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2016, and in 2020 she was awarded the Prix Marguerite Yourcenar for her entire body of work.

Stump’s translation of her novel The Witch, first published in French in 1996, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026.

NDiaye lives in Paris.

about the translator:

Jordan Stump has translated many authors into English from French, including Marie Redonnet, Eric Chevillard, and Honoré de Balzac.

His translation of Jardin des Plantes by Claude Simon won the 2001 French-American Foundation translation prize, and he was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Artes et des Lettres in 2006.

His English language translations of works by Marie NDiaye have been nominated for the International Booker Prize twice. Ladivine was longlisted for the prize in 2016, and The Witch was shortlisted in 2026.

=============

2026 International Booker: In-Progress Rankings(shortlisted books are numbered!)
—The Remembered Soldier, Anjet Daanje (tr. David McKay)
1. She Who Remains, Rene Karabash (tr. Izidora Angel)
2. The Director, Daniel Kehlmann (tr. Ross Benjamin)
3. The Witch, Marie NDiaye (tr. Jordan Stump)
—The Deserters, Mathias Enard (tr. Charlotte Mandell)
4. On Earth As It Is Beneath, Ana Paula Maia (tr. Padma Viswanathan)
—Women Without Men, Shahrnush Parsipur (tr. Faridoun Farrokh)
—The Wax Child, Olga Ravn (tr. Martin Aitken)
5. The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran, Shida Bazyar (tr. Ruth Martin)
6. Taiwan Travelogue, Yáng Shuāng-zĩ (tr. Lin King)
—We Are Green & Trembling, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara (tr. Robin Myers)
[11/13 & currently reading: The Duke, Matteo Melchiore (tr. Antonella Lettieri) & Small Comfort, la Genberg (tr. Kira Josefsson)]

[Marie LeMen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Cela commence bien, écriture élégante, agréable. Dommage que le récit soit sans grand intérêt. Les filles sont esquissées seulement alors qu'elles auraient pu constituer des personnages intéressants et donner du ressort à l'intrigue. C'est du moins ce que j'attendais. Très décevante lecture. On s'ennuie a mesure que le récit s'étire sans que les promesses narratives ne mènent nulle part.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Witch by Marie NDiaye — ⭐⭐⭐¼

I came in slightly underwhelmed and left with more warmth than I expected, which is perhaps the most fitting response to a novel about a mediocre witch in a mediocre marriage.

The Witch follows Lucie, a housewife from a long line of witches whose own powers are frustratingly weak: she can sometimes glimpse the future, but more often just catches insignificant details of somewhere else entirely.

When she initiates her twin daughters Maud and Lise into the family's craft, their abilities quickly and humiliatingly surpass her own. What follows is a quietly strange portrait of motherhood, marriage, and the particular power dynamics that run through both.

What I liked most is the humor that threads through the whole thing: dry, understated, and often genuinely funny. The way she renders Lucie and her daughters and her neighbor is sharply observed. NDiaye successfully portrays Lucie as someone trapped in various circumstances: her daughters witchy abilities surpassing her own, her tense relationship with her husband, and being the child who tries to make her divorced parents live together again, but with disastrous effects. The prose is beautiful throughout, and the novel's exploration of womanhood, familial relationships, and social expectation gives it real substance beneath the rather absurd surface.

One thing that left me scratching my head: after the daughters come into their powers, they essentially become birds and fly away and never appear again. I can see the argument that this is intentional, that their disappearance enacts their liberation, that they outgrow Lucie and the stifling world she's trapped in and simply leave. But it also just felt abrupt, like NDiaye had abandoned her own characters. I'm genuinely not sure whether that ambiguity is the point or a flaw.

It never fully won me over though. I liked it, but I didn't love it. It sits comfortably in the territory of a book I'm glad I read without feeling the need to press it into anyone's hands. A solid shortlist entry, though perhaps not my pick for the prize.

[WndyJW · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sundays are perfect for novellas that can be read in one sitting and this International Booker 2025 nominated story of a less than mediocre witch, her far more powerful daughters, her very powerful mother, and the sorry state of their family was excellent.

Marie NDiaye should be in every avid reader's personal library. This is only my 3rd NDiaye, but she is now a completist author for me.

Ms. NDiaye is a confident, brilliant writer of psychologically intense stories that are surreal without being impenetrable (which is how I find most surrealist fiction,) with just enough magic realism to create tension and mystery, without earning the magic realism tag, and with oracular symbolism and allegory that make the stories timeless. I thought this book was recently written, but it was written 30 years ago, so while I thought I was reading about women becoming self-aware and mother-daughter issues, it might have been about women taking back their power or insisting on their independence, likely it's about all of it.

I highly recommend this book and this author!

[Gill Bennett · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a difficult book to summarise! Shortlisted for this year’s International Booker Prize by an author I had previously been unaware of, it was an enjoyable but perplexing experience. Unlike books published in chronological order when translation is not an issue and authors offer up the efforts of their toil sequentially, I found that Marie NDiaye has a long history of published works some of which have received France’s highest literary honour: The Prix Goncourt.
The narrative is fragmentary and at times dreamlike with magical interludes, the reader isn’t sure what is ‘real’ to the main protagonist and the plot outline is quite bizarre. There is also a lot of humour and much is directed at the hapless men in the witches life, perhaps criticisms directed at inadequate men in general. The book also comments on family relationships particularly the inevitable pain of letting go of offspring. It’s a very short read, under 150 pages, and perhaps best read in one sitting in order to make sense of it.
Overall an experimental book and well written.

[cass krug · Rating 5 out of 5]

kicking myself for not reviewing this one immediately after finishing it because i really loved it, but this month has been too long and crazy for me to do it justice now.

so excited to see ndiaye shortlisted for the international booker - she’s quickly become one of my favorite authors and this book is just adding to her merit in my eyes. i think the thing i appreciate so much about her work is that even though there are some vaguely supernatural elements, she never takes it over the top. if you’re looking for fantasy, the witch is not it. but if you want a quietly unsettling tale about family strains and womanhood, look no further. this felt similar to the days of abandonment by elena ferrante, with the uneasiness dialed up to a 10 as it always is with ndiaye. i devoured this and can’t wait to read more of her work.

thank you to vintage and netgalley for the digital copy! enjoyed it so much i had to buy myself the paperback.

[Sarah (sarahanneisreading) · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars