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A Novel
by Leila Slimani
She has the keys to their apartment. She knows everything. She has embedded herself so deeply in their lives that it now seems impossible to remove her.
When Myriam decides to return to work as a lawyer after having children, she and her husband look for the perfect nanny for their son and daughter. They never dreamed they would find Louise: a quiet, polite, devoted woman who sings to the children, cleans the family's chic Paris apartment, stays late without complaint, and hosts enviable kiddie parties. But as the couple and the nanny become more dependent on one another, jealousy, resentment, and suspicions mount, shattering the idyllic tableau. Building tension with every page, The Perfect Nanny is a compulsive, riveting, bravely observed exploration of power, class, race, domesticity, motherhood, and madness—and the American debut of an immensely talented writer.
"This is no mere ripped-from-the-headlines airport paperback: The Perfect Nanny is a tough book about a grim subject, staring down the hard truth of this monstrous incident with clarity and conviction. Its power leaps out from the unforgettable opening sentence: 'The baby is dead.' No sentiment, no sensationalism: pure horror." —The New York Times
"A devastating, entrancing, literary psychological drama supported by absorbing character studies ... Readers won't be able to look away." —Booklist
"Expertly probes [a mother's] guilt at leaving her children with a stranger ... Those seeking a thought-provoking character study will appreciate this gripping anatomy of a crime." —Publishers Weekly
"The why of this horrific crime remains unfathomable, rendering it all the more frightening." —Kirkus Reviews
This information about The Perfect Nanny was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Leila Slimani is the first Moroccan woman to win France's most prestigious literary prize, the Goncourt, which she won for The Perfect Nanny. Her first novel, Adèle, about a sex-addicted woman in Paris, won the La Mamounia Prize for the best book by a Moroccan author written in French and gave rise to her nonfiction book Sex and Lies: True Stories of Women's Intimate Lives in the Arab World. A journalist and frequent commentator on women's and human rights, Slimani is French president Emmanuel Macron's personal representative for the promotion of the French language and culture and was ranked #2 on Vanity Fair France's annual list of the Fifty Most Influential French People in the World. Born in Rabat, Morocco, in 1981, she now lives in Paris with her French husband and their two young children.
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