Vengeance Is Mine

Marie Ndiaye

"A powerful story of mothers and daughters" Guardian When Gilles Principaux walks into Maître Susane's legal practice 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, a case that will be splashed across the news media in Bordeaux and beyond. So why has he entrusted his wife's fate to her small, unremarkable practice? 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 sinister she has never known how to remember. But Gilles seems so at ease her in presence that Maître Susane begins to believe that her memory must be playing tricks on her. Haunted by a past that both escapes and consumes her, Maître Susane fights to hold on to her memory, her identity and the chance she's been given to avenge herself. Translated from the French by Jordan Stump.