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

It wasn't the girls I was worried about, convinced as I was that no change in the nuances of his amorphous displays of affection would ever affect their stubborn, greedy vitality, focused on promises and hopes well beyond the two of us, their parents, caring nothing for the modest goals we'd so laboriously attained. No, none of that would ever touch them, not, at least, coming from their minimally interesting, irascible, overstressed father. My fear, as I climbed the basement stairs to the kitchen, was simply that a little more revulsion and resentment in the overstuffed baggage of my husband's feelings might turn the quietly disharmonious atmosphere of the house overtly oppressive.

"Oh hello, Isabelle," I said at the top of the steps.

The basement stairs opened straight into the kitchen, so Isabelle saw me come in with the harried look that the exercise of my paltry gift inevitably left on my face. As always, she'd made herself perfectly at home in our house, though she was scarcely more than a neighbor. She'd brought along her four- or five-year-old son, who had a vaguely American first name. Looking out the window, I spied him in the yard with Maud and Lise.

"So what did you see?" Isabelle immediately asked.

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.