Vengeance Is Mine

A Novel

By: Marie NDiaye, Jordan Stump - translator

Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman

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.

©2023 Marie NDiaye and Jordan Stump (P)2023 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“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

A beautiful read

I loved this smart thriller, but the ending was a little hard to follow by audio. I might have preferred to read this rather than listen. However Rebecca Lowman is one of the all time great readers, so her performance is delicious as always. I find abstract books can sometimes be better read than listened to.

What!?

Don’t know what’s the point. Kept waiting for some resolution or relief from the bleakness.

Good writing, bad story

I was really interested in this at the beginning of the book, but the ending is incredibly confusing and disappointing. The writing is very good. I just didn’t follow the point.

But where was the "vengeance?"

Exceptionally well-written with a translation that doesn't seem to lose any of the disorienting, stream of consciousness narrative.

However, I could not for the life of me figure out what was going on in this story. It was more like an assemblage of feelings and reactions to real and imagined past treatment and a lot less like a novel for me.

A real "what the hap is f*ckening" situation throughout.

ugh no

This is a 6.5 hour run-on sentence. There is no dialogue, just stream of consciousness word salad. I'm not sure if it is due to translation, narrator delivery, or a combination of both. I found this book completely annoying and tedious.