This Little Family

Ines Bayard’s This Little Family was a controversial debut in France when it appeared, and the English translation by Adriana Hunter brought it to a wider audience. The novel opens with Marie, a young French woman, being raped by her boss. She tells no one. The rest of the book unfolds across the years that follow, including a pregnancy whose origin she cannot be sure of, a marriage that doesn’t know what it’s holding, and the slow disintegration that follows.

Bayard writes in a deliberately spare style. The book is short. The violence and the silence about it are both rendered without softening.

The ending is shocking and deliberate. Bayard has spoken about her reasons for writing the book the way she did.

Readers should know what they’re picking up. This is not comfortable reading. For readers who can handle the material, the book sits alongside Annie Ernaux or Edouard Louis in the contemporary French tradition of unflinching personal-political fiction.