A WILLING suspension of disbelief is essential to appreciating Marie NDiaye’s The Witch (Vintage, $16.78). As with many works of literary fantasy, the novel asks readers to accept the coexistence of the ordinary and the impossible, presenting the supernatural not as an intrusion upon reality but as one of its natural extensions. The result is a peculiar domestic narrative centred on a witch whose magical abilities are treated with the same matter-of-factness as marriage, motherhood and middle-class disappointment.
The Witch is the ninth of French writer Marie NDiaye’s novels to be translated into English. Originally published in French in 1996 as La Sorcière, it was translated by Jordan Stump and recently shortlisted for the 2026 International Booker Prize. NDiaye has long distinguished herself as a novelist of extraordinary psychological acuity, producing works that are at once philosophical, unsettling and emotionally precise. Novels such as Ladivine and Vengeance Is Mine demonstrate her gift for creating narratives that feel both dreamlike and profoundly real. Her fiction often possesses the compressed elegance of a novella, with sharply delineated characters and meticulous attention to interiority. In this respect, she bears comparison to writers such as Sayaka Murata and Banana Yoshimoto, whose deceptively simple prose often conceals deeper existential concerns. At just 114 pages, The Witch shares this economy of style and thought.
The titular witch is not the fairy-tale sorceress of folklore. Lucie, the novel’s protagonist, is first and foremost a wife and mother. NDiaye’s central conceit is that witchcraft is hereditary and surprisingly commonplace. Witches marry, raise children, quarrel with spouses and struggle with family obligations. Lucie’s twin daughters, Maud and Lise, are witches too: cold, aloof children whose emotional detachment makes them both fascinating and unsettling. Their eventual departure from the narrative through literal flight is rendered with such effortless conviction that it feels entirely plausible within the novel’s strange logic.
Lucie’s mother is also a witch. Recently separated from her husband, she presides over one of the novel’s most memorable transformations: Lucie’s father has been reduced to the form of a snail through magical means. NDiaye treats this absurdity with remarkable restraint. The father’s condition is simultaneously comic and tragic, eliciting laughter even as it evokes pity. Such moments exemplify the novel’s peculiar emotional register, where melancholy and humour coexist in uneasy proximity. There is a sadness here generated by characters who are themselves experts at making others unhappy.
Indeed, few of the novel’s characters are conventionally likeable. Lucie is relentlessly judgemental, her observations of others often bordering on cruelty. She appraises people with a candour that recalls the unfiltered honesty of children, frequently fixating on physical appearance and bodily flaws. Her husband, Pierrot, is hardly more appealing. Like Lucie’s father, he is a thief, though his transgressions are compounded by a passive-aggressive temperament that makes him particularly irritating. Then there is Isabelle, Lucie’s friend and neighbour, whose relationship with her young son wavers between neglect and hostility. Her affection rarely manifests as care; more often, it takes the form of abandonment or daily criticism. The boy emerges as perhaps the novel’s most sympathetic figure, a lonely and bewildered child trapped within a world of emotionally impoverished adults.
NDiaye constructs a social universe in which empathy is scarce and familial bonds are marked more by obligation than affection. Yet the novel never judges its characters outright. Instead, it observes them with a cool detachment, allowing readers to draw their own conclusions. The men fare particularly poorly. Lucie’s father is an embezzler whose moral failings are costly. Pierrot steals money from the family’s joint account and abandons his wife and daughters without warning. Significantly, neither Lucie nor the twins seem especially distressed by his departure. His absence is merely a mild inconvenience.
As the narrative progresses, The Witch assumes the shape of a picaresque journey. Lucie and her daughters travel across France, visiting her mother and searching for the missing Pierrot. When the twins eventually fly away, Lucie continues alone. Her travels ultimately lead her to her husband, who has established a new family and settled into a different life. Their reunion is one of the novel’s most revealing scenes. Remarkably calm and almost devoid of confrontation, the encounter unfolds with the stillness of water in a glass. Everyone involved appears resigned to circumstances they lack the energy to challenge. The resulting atmosphere is one of emotional torpor, as though the characters have exhausted their capacity for outrage and settled instead for uneasy acceptance.
Later, Lucie reconnects with Isabelle, who now operates a boarding school for troubled girls, a somewhat dubious institution that attracts the desperate and the unwanted. Lucie secures employment there, though, predictably, the arrangement proves short-lived. Stability, in NDiaye’s fictional universe, is always temporary.
Nothing goes particularly well for anyone in this novel. Yet its emotional honesty makes it compelling. In its unsparing attention to resentment, disappointment and familial estrangement, The Witch recalls the fiction of Jamaica Kincaid, particularly The Autobiography of My Mother and See Now Then. Like Kincaid, NDiaye possesses an extraordinary ability to render the complexities of inner life with startling clarity. Lucie’s thoughts, however unpleasant, often feel uncannily real.
Motherhood occupies a central place in the novel, though NDiaye offers none of the comforting maternal archetypes of literary fiction. The mothers in The Witch are emotionally distant, impatient and frequently ambivalent towards their children. Isabelle’s inexplicable hostility towards her son, Lucie’s detached relationship with her daughters and Lucie’s mother’s strained interactions with her own family all point towards a vision of parenthood defined less by nurturing than by endurance. This emotional climate explains why Lucie’s daughters eventually take flight, literally escaping a world to which they feel little attachment.
The Witch is a strange, memorable and thoroughly enjoyable novel. Its pages are populated by deeply flawed people doing and saying unpleasant things, much as people often do in real life. Add to this witches who cry blood, little girls who fly and a man transformed into a snail, and the result is a work of fiction that is as entertaining as it is unsettling. Dark, moody and psychologically incisive, the novel is also unexpectedly funny, its humour emerging from the absurdity of human behaviour rather than from overt comedy. NDiaye has crafted a small but remarkable novel, one that lingers in the mind long after its final page.
