Marie NDiaye has long been celebrated for her unrivaled ability to make us see just how little we understand about ourselves. My Heart Hemmed In is her most powerful statement on the hidden selves that we rarely glimpse, and are often shocked by. There is something very wrong with Nadia and her husband Ange, middle-aged provincial schoolteachers who slowly realize that they are despised by everyone around them. One day a savage wound appears in Ange's stomach, and as Nadia fights to save her husband's life their hideous neighbor Noget, a man everyone insists is a famous author, inexplicably imposes his care upon them. While Noget fattens them with ever richer foods, Nadia embarks on a nightmarish visit to her ex-husband and estranged son, is she abandoning Ange or revisiting old grievances in an attempt to save him? Conjuring an atmosphere of paranoia and menace, My Heart Hemmed In creates a bizarre, foggy world where strange coincidences, harsh cruelty, and constantly shifting relationships all seem part of some shadowy truth. Surreal, allegorical, and psychologically acute, My Heart Hemmed In shows a masterful author giving her readers her most complex and compelling world yet.
"My Heart Hemmed In thoroughly consumes the reader with its lovely, spooky language…Like Samantha Schweblin's Fever Dream, it generates both a sense of mounting unease and a pleasurable desire to learn just what, exactly, has gon so wrong."
Caite Dolan-Leach, author of Dead Letters
"Claustrophobic, slow-burning…and devastating."
Publishers Weekly
"The latest tradition of Marie Ndiaye into English is unquestionably one of the great novels of 2017. Eerily prescient in its examination of cruelty, xenophobia, and paranoia, My Heart Hemmed In is both a comfort and a warning in an increasingly destabilized world."
