The Witch

“The Witch is Marie NDiaye at her most dazzling.In this simple, startlingly powerful novel, NDiaye lays outher central themes: familial secrets, power, shame, andliberation. NDiaye is one of the greats—her novels aremesmerizing, wholly singular, completely unforgettable.”—Katie Kitamura, author of Audition 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. Ultimately, her life raises questions that we all have to ask: How can home be a place that nurtures, when mother-blood has manifold powers: to rescue, to capture, to entrap, or abandon? What does it mean to provide for the ones you love? And how can you—can you?—build a nest that no one wants to fly from?