Excerpt from The Witch by Marie NDiaye, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"No offense, Mama, but really, it's all just so lame," said Maud, and that was their only comment upon joining the ageless procession of occult-powered women. I found myself wondering if they really believed in it all. Their way of cleaning their faces seemed so cool, so final, so relieved, as if, the ceremony at an end, they could now never again subject their practical minds, eager for tangible, productive sorts of knowledge, to such idiotic exercises.

"You know, the gift can be a useful thing to have," I told them, in hopes of appealing to their taste for efficacy. But I said nothing more. My own talent was slight, apparently just strong enough to keep the gift going, to pass it along. So I couldn't name one time when it had come in handy for me. My abilities were in all honesty laughable, they allowed me to see trivialities, nothing more. I had to work hard to set my process for divination or retrospection in motion, but however important the subject I could only glimpse insignificant details that revealed nothing at all: the color of an outfit, the look of the sky, a steaming coffee cup in the hand of the person fixed by my clairvoyant gaze ... What, then, was I supposed to convince my dubious daughters of? Their new acquisition meant nothing to them, I could tell, and they welcomed it with contrived goodwill, simply to make me happy.

"Promise me one thing," I went on. "If you ever have daughters, do with them as I've done with you for the past year."

But they only laughed, shrugging their sharp little shoulders, then darkly muttering that there was no point waiting for them to get married. I thought them so fierce, so resolute, so solidly asexual in the slightly grimy jeans hanging loose around their slim hips that once again I let the matter drop, embarrassed to have let myself slip into sentimentality before that hard, gruff little pair.

Still, it vexed me to think that the power might be passed on no further. Their grandmother had grudgingly taught it to me, even though she so hated her own far mightier power that she never used it. She wouldn't talk about it, probably did her best not to believe in it, considered it just one more in a hodgepodge of superstitions handed down by her illiterate mother. But when the time came, trying to forget for a few months that she had to project disbelief in the power's very existence, and also motivated by a sense of duty weightier than her personal convictions, she taught me what I now know, in bits and pieces to be sure, with a palpable distaste that made me squirm in my chair, but tirelessly, until she saw me several times spill abundant tears of blood. Perhaps her lack of faith was responsible for my limited abilities. In my daughters' case, I could see they would never feel obliged to obey any law whose violation entailed no serious consequences for their lifestyle, and even that they would soon forget passing the gift on was a law at all. How could I blame them? The force of their feral, sensual energy defied any notion of disappointment or rancor.

They gave me a hurried kiss on their way out of the basement, the faintly sweet scent of the blood lingering on their cheeks, and it occurred to me that when their father kissed them on coming home from work that evening he would immediately realize my lessons had borne fruit. He wouldn't say anything about it to me. He would stick to the discretion, tinged with disgust and contempt, that he'd always shown my powers the few times I couldn't avoid using them in his presence. He must surely have guessed what sort of exercise my daughters and I were regularly engaging in downstairs, and although he'd long known this day would come, it still might have nettled him. Maybe, I told myself, he'd been hoping, absurdly, that I would forget, would neglect to initiate Maud and Lise, or that they would prove so unreceptive to the discipline he knew the process entailed that I would give up on the idea. How, I wondered with a tingle of apprehension, would he react when he got a whiff of his daughters' cheeks that evening? I feared he might conceive the same irrepressible aversion for Maud and Lise as he felt for me, an aversion his overworked, clouded mind didn't see, but which I saw all too well, and which he didn't always manage to hold in.

Excerpted from The Witch by Marie NDiaye. Copyright © 2026 by Marie NDiaye. Excerpted by permission of Vintage. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.