The Witch
By Marie N’Diaye, translated by Jordan Stump
Paperback/Ebook/Audio
ISBN: 979-8217006809
Penguin Random House, April 7, 2026, 144 pgs

Lucie is a bad witch. By that, I don’t mean she’s evil. Instead, she’s incompetent. In her small 1990s French town, her weak and intermittent visions of the future aren’t a very big deal, even if they do cause her to weep blood in front of the neighbors. Thanks to her husband’s hard work, she lives a comfy middle-class stay-at-home mom life. Still, when her two daughters turn thirteen, she decides to initiate them into the family’s ancestral witchcraft anyway. To her surprise, the girls take to it in eerie, rebellious ways, exacerbating her husband’s growing unhappiness with marriage and family life. Lucie finds herself trying to manage relationships that may not exist anymore, constantly subverting her power and desires in life, but not everyone is going to follow her people-pleasing lead.

It’s always really interesting to read speculative fiction in translation. Writers from other countries often have different ways of approaching narrative, unique supernatural tropes, and surprising approaches to story resolution. There’s also room for experimentation that we don’t always see in mainstream American publishing, resulting in shorter books, more experimental use of language, and, in some cases, writers who usually don’t touch genre fiction diving deeply into it. Previously, I only knew Marie N’Diaye as the French and Senegalese writer who won the Prix Goncourt for her diaspora epic, Three Strong Women. I was a little surprised to see a short horror fantasy novel from her pop up this year, but she handles genre just as well as she does literary fiction. There’s a lot of literary style and a strong eye for detail, most of which imparts the casual but constant presence of French culture to the story.

Perhaps because of N’Diaye’s roots as a writer or perhaps because of differing cultural conventions, this book might be a bit different than what frequent readers of witchy fiction might expect. Aside from the aforementioned very literary tone, it’s also not a traditional witch narrative in a lot of ways. In the world of The Witch, everyone seems to know that magic exists, but nobody is too interested in it. As a result, when magic happens, it’s integral to the narrative but very undramatically presented. That doesn’t mean that some of the magical moments aren’t shocking—at least one made me gasp and speak out loud to the book—but there are no big triumphant moments of showy magical power or epic supernatural battle for justice. Magic, when it happens, is kind of quiet and sharp. The women of The Witch feel like they are magic, much more so than they appear to do magic. It’s no surprise, then, that the major conflict in the story isn’t really about conflicting spells or different power systems. It’s much more about the ways these witches choose to either embrace their magical powers or subvert them into the mundane to get along in the mainstream.

Speaking of subversion, thematically, this book, as a whole, feels like every part of contemporary feminist discourse neatly laid out in one story. The 1990s setting helps—the choices of Lucie’s mother and mother-in-law regarding things like work and family make a lot more sense when you realize that these are women who came out of the French feminist movement of the 1970s (the MLF) deciding to have traditional, male-centered families and lives. Their daughters and granddaughters are very much the products of their choices, and knowing a bit about how French feminism was socially distinctive compared to other movements happening around the same time could help readers parse the underlying meaning behind some of the book’s harsher moments and imagery. It’s not a necessity for understanding or enjoying the book, however. For all its careful literary choices in language and the light touch with which magic is applied, The Witch never really feels didactic or preachy. Creepy and sad, yes, and you’ll probably want to shake Lucie until her eyes rattle when you get to the end of the story. But, while it’s an essentially feminist parable that doesn’t hide its Aesops, it’s also a disturbing story of magic subverted and suppressed at the hands of its own practitioners, whether or not they realize it.

The laconic detail to sudden nasty shock ratio of this book and the simultaneously gentle and harsh tone of the prose reminded me of the Zach Cregger film Weapons and S.L. Coney’s 2023 novella Wild Spaces. If you enjoyed either of those, you’ll probably enjoy this as well.