Lullaby - Tapa blanda

A nanny wields such emotional power, despite a sometimes appalling lack of rights or status or future. ..It's an explosive cocktail, and Leïla Slimani's deft, often agonising novel shakes it up with a precision that takes your breath away.
The acid, throwaway beauty of so many of Slimani's descriptions and phrases [means] that you are taken deep into a fragile, damaged yet somehow rationally irrational psyche. I closed this book feeling very shaken but also with a sense that I'd just had an experience that almost no other art form could have given me. Long live the novel.

'Anyone who has ever had to hire someone to look after their children in their own home knows that it is unlike any other working arrangement...Leïla Slimani's brilliantly executed insight is that there is great emotional jeopardy for everyone involved.

It would have been easy, and narratively effective, for Slimani to build a picture of a psychopath; it's clear, in the kind of mythic language she uses and from the occasional slightly overdone gothic touch, that she was tempted. She achieves the far more interesting feat, however, of playing entirely valid points of view against each other, sometimes in consecutive sentences: one minute we are seeing things from Louise's point of view; in the next her face is blank and we are outside again, with the parents. Rather like childhood, Slimani's novel arrives at its inevitable climax through an accretion of seeming banalities and mundane pressures.This is a political book about emotional work, about women and children and their costs and losses. But, partly because Slimani looks so clearly at these losses, not only giving them their due, but placing them carefully for full narrative impact, Lullaby also works as a thriller, which is quite a balancing act to pull off.'

'There's always something slightly uncomfortable about books that rip their plots from the headlines, a sense that we are thoughtlessly delving into someone else's private anguish. Thankfully Leïla Slimani's Prix Goncourt-winning Lullaby, which takes its inspiration from a real-life case in New York in 2012, manages to rise above these unpromising beginnings to tell a taut tale of poverty and privilege, motherhood and work, marital tensions and unequal relationships, all underpinned by the terrible question: what could lead someone to murder two children?

Slimani has a keen eye for the small ways in which nannies are slighted and ignored and is smart too about the way in which we celebrate the notion of the perfect mother while condemning those, such as Myriam, who refuse to sublimate themselves in their children's desires.

Ultimately Lullaby's haunting power comes from the fact that Slimani emphasises with her adult characters while refusing to let any of them off the hook: they are all in some way complicit in Mila and Adam's terrible deaths. As an examination of what happens when privilege, power and poverty intersect so personally it is hard to beat.'