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.
A Best Book of the Year:
The New York Times Book Review
The Boston Globe
Real Simple
Lit Hub
Entertainment Weekly (honorable mention)
Book of the Year, The British Book Awards (Debut Fiction)
Winner of the Prix Goncourt
Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for
Mystery/Thriller
Finalist for the Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original
“Mesmerizingly twisted.” —The New York Times Book Review, “The
10 Best Books of 2018”
“Exquisite . . . In Slimani’s hands, the unthinkable becomes art.
The Perfect Nanny won France’s most prestigious literary award. . .
. One can see why the judges were wowed.” —Maureen
Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air
“I’ve thought about [it] pretty much every day. . . . [It] felt
less like an entertainment, or even a work of art, than like a
compulsion. I found it extraordinary. . . . If you are a mother,
whatever kind of mother you aspire to be, you’ll know what kind of
mother you are after reading Slimani. If you are not a mother, the
insights that she administers can be no less jolting. . .
. Like Jenny Offill, Slimani can write ravishingly of female
bodies, even postpartum ones. . . . The novelist Rachel Cusk has
chronicled what motherhood did to her; Slimani examines what
mothering is doing to society.” —Lauren Collins, The New Yorker
“I loved this book, I hated this book, this book changed me. . . .
What The Perfect Nanny does so incredibly well is plumb the
essential relationship between parents and nanny—and really, mother
and nanny. . . . A chillingly clever horror novel about class and
parenting.” —Barrie Hardymon, NPR’s Guide to 2018’s Great Reads
“[A] slim dagger of a novel . . . You won’t move until you reach
the last page.” —People
“This book is a dazzling nightmare you don’t want to leave. I
gasped at its final chapters, putting it down to breathe. Then I
turned back to the start and immediately began
rereading.” —Tiffany May, The New York Times Book Review
“Deliciously twisty . . . An exquisitely crafted portrait of
creeping madness and child murder . . . Slimani’s exploration
of race and class is razor-sharp and brilliantly provides the fuel
for a hair-raising tale of domestic
horror.” —Entertainment Weekly, “The Ten Best New Thrillers to
Read This Spring”
“Remember The Nanny Diaries? Well, this is like if someone brushed
the pages of that book with arsenic.” —Harper’s Bazaar, “16
Thriller Books That Will Give You Instant Goosebumps”
“The first ‘hot’ novel of 2018 . . . Unflinching . . . assured . .
. The book aspires toward the taut elegance of that classic nanny
nightmare tale, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, and, in
language and complexity, it comes pretty darn close. . . . Talk
about a guilty pleasure.” —The Washington Post
“So twisted and creepy, but absolutely captivating.” —Lauren
Christensen, The New York Times Book Review (podcast)
“It’s excruciating, and almost more than anything that I could
imagine—and therefore I read on.” —Pamela Paul, The New York
Times Book Review (podcast)
“Brilliantly observed . . . Slimani is brilliantly insightful about
the peculiar station nannies assume within the households of
working families.” —The Wall Street Journal
“Dazzling . . . A portrait etched in shards of glass . .
. Slimani is an astute observer of power politics in the home.
. . . The hints of France’s greatest short-story writer emerge
in the first pages. . . . We begin The Perfect Nanny in
horror, and then miraculously, swiftly, Slimani creates a person
out of that powerful spectacle. In this fashion the novel functions
like an extended Maupassant story turned inside out.” —John
Freeman, The Boston Globe
“A taut page-turner about what can happen when no one pays
attention to what matters most . . . Illuminates the treatment of
domestic workers, the petty ugliness that can be endemic to
marriage, and the primal fears that accompany having
children.” —O, The Oprah Magazine
“I devoured the entire thing in a day or two. I read it . . .
horrified and anxious, yet unable to put it down. It’s a gripping
read . . . : a little window into a person’s brain as they unravel
into the unthinkable.” —Lori Keong, New York
“You won’t be able to put this book down.” —Real Simple
“Shocking, riveting.” —Vulture
“A devastating little book.” —The AV Club
“If you love dark, propulsive thrillers, you’ll be hooked. . . .
Like a good horror film, it offered a safe environment in which to
explore all my latent fears. . . . A painfully lurid, one-eye-open
kind of pleasure.” —Leah McLaren, MSN
“Spare and evocative . . . A book that haunts you long after you’ve
put it down.” —The Cut
“[An] unnerving cautionary tale . . . Pretty radical for a domestic
thriller, but what’s more remarkable about this unconventional
novel is the author’s intimate analysis of the special relationship
between a mother and a nanny. . . . Slimani writes devastatingly
perceptive character studies.” —Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times
Book Review
“Chilling . . . A slim page-turner, The Perfect Nanny can be read
in a single, shivery sitting. . . . It will make a great
film.” —The Economist
“Gripping . . . Slimani’s slick storytelling turns this
bread-and-butter thriller premise into a deeply intelligent
excavation of fraught themes like class, sexism, motherhood, and
moral goodness. . . . The text is efficient and propulsive . . .
featuring sentences that will hold you in suspense until the very
last page. . . . You should read this when you’re already strapped
into your seat on the plane because if you read this before
boarding, you may become so enthralled that you miss your flight to
Paris.” —Condé Nast Traveler
“Slimani ratchets up the tension here through close quarters,
resentment and complicity. The book . . . is chilling and an
important look at the unseen challenges faced by service
workers.” —The Washington Post, “A Guide to the Best New
Thrillers”
“Grabs us by the throat . . . The story’s tension builds
relentlessly. . . . Fans of psychological thrillers will find it a
perfect start to their 2018 reading list.” —Minneapolis
Star-Tribune
“A masterpiece of imagination. Slimani sets up an unanswerable
question and answers it: In her hands, the conundrum of who could
do such a thing, and why, becomes a surgical interrogation of
bourgeois French culture and the tensions of parenthood.” —Sophie
Gilbert, The Atlantic
“A deft portrait of bourgeois family life in the twenty-first
century . . . Readers aren’t likely to converge on a single
interpretation of why Louise has done what she’s done. Ultimately,
she holds sway as a symbol rather than as a psychological reality,
a choice that makes this deftly told tale all the more eerie.” —Amy
Weiss-Meyer, The Atlantic
“Like Gone Girl, the novel deserves praise for pulling off a tricky
plot with nuance. . . . Slimani’s focus on race and class certainly
elevates the book’s crime-drama stakes into something more
complicated.” —The New Republic
“Easily one of my favorite books of the year . . . Gravely artful .
. . A penetrating, existential thriller that is fiercely
complicated about race and class.” —Minna Zallman Proctor,
Bookforum
“More artfully composed than many of the books in its
genre.” —The New York Times
“Terrifying, brilliant . . . A truly chilling story that promises
to leave you questioning all your long-held thoughts on motherhood
and the different prices paid as women try to achieve something
resembling domestic bliss.” —Nylon
“A classic, even Dostoevskian, tale of one person’s descent into
madness.” —The Millions
“[A] stunner of an opening . . . Slimani’s characters are
well drawn, and she laces her narrative with acute observations,
and seems intent to let no one off the hook for the terrible act at
the heart of the story. . . . [It] feels scarily real. . . .
Her matter-of-fact tone adds a layer of creepiness. . .
. Slimani gives us much to think about. . . . She comes across
as an artist doomed to find the dark side in everything. . . . But
that doom may be her great gift.” —WBUR
“This brutal chiller has the same compulsive readability as Emma
Donoghue’s Room.” —The Guardian
“The ‘French Gone Girl’ . . . Anyone reading [it] can tell
within a few paragraphs that its author is a mother . . . who has
felt firsthand the perfect split of agony, ecstasy and mind-numbing
boredom that motherhood entails.” —The Telegraph
“A brilliantly deft depiction of modern notions of motherhood,
class and race.” —Vogue (U.K.)
“The novel, which draws on elements from the real story of a nanny
from the Dominican Republic who has been accused of killing two
children under her care in New York in 2012, pieces together
disparate events that culminate in a nightmarish outcome.” —The New
York Times
“This novel—a runaway hit in France—is coming to the United States
this month, and it’s sure to take this country by storm, too.”
—Bustle
“Just as America became engulfed in Gone Girl and Girl on the Train
last year, France became obsessed with The Perfect Nanny. . . . As
taboo and shocking as the subject matter is, the underlying theme
of women exploring their desires is what stands out. . . . A
must-read.” —Hello Giggles
“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
“A darkly propulsive nail-biter overlain with a vivid and piercing
study of class tensions.” —Library Journal, “Top Ten Titles for
Winter Reading”
“If you’ve ever taken care of a kid, even if, just on a bus,
someone has handed you a child for five seconds as they rummage
through their purse, this will do something to you. . . . At the
end of reading this book, I was so devastated, but I really felt
like I was looking at the world through new eyes.” —Barrie
Hardymon, NPR’s Weekend Edition
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