Small Press Dispatch: Tears of Blood and Mediocrity

Roseanna Pendlebury Marie NDiaye’s The Witch was originally published in French as La sorcière in 1996. Translated into English by Jordan Stump 30 years later, it was shortlisted for the 2026 International Booker Prize. It depicts a brief period in the life of Lucie, a witch of meagre talent, as she teaches the use of her gift to her daughters and observes them coming into their powers as the rest of her life falls apart. It is a meditation on power and powerlessness, motherhood, and on fraught relationships between parents and children and married couples, set in the quiet of French suburban life. Told in relatively spare but engaging prose, the author’s tendency towards clustered adjectives gives it a distinctive voice, a slightly melodramatic tone that overlays what is an otherwise incredibly mundane plot. While there is often something of a gap between original publication and English translation, thirty years is a little further out from the norm. Aside from whatever drove the…