Marie NDiaye’s The Witch is a disquieting and curious novel. Through a series of fleeting encounters and dreamlike scenes, the author imparts a vague, otherworldly quality to a mundane domestic landscape. It’s a slim book but one that is packed with commentary on marriage, motherhood, family secrets and duplicity. 

The story is set in a drab, nameless neighbourhood in France. The protagonist, Lucie, is a witch with powers that are, ‘in all honesty, laughable’. She passes on what skills she has to her twelve-year-old twin daughters and initiates them into the world of witchcraft. Despite the girls’ budding clairvoyance, which causes their eyes to well with blood, they are unfazed by their powers. Lucie is perplexed, wondering how she might change her daughters’ attitude. She feels her ‘spine slumping from unfocused exhaustion at the thought of it’. 

Enter Pierrot, Lucie’s husband, a social engineer who spends his days ‘trying to convince respectable, well-to-do couples to buy a lifetime of annual weeklong vacations’ in various far-flung locations. He returns home accompanied by a client who has just fled his family. Pierrot takes off two days later with a