FUTURE FIRES
he French-Moroccan author Leïla Slimani’s second novel, published in France in 2016 and translated into English as Lullaby, is about a nanny who works for a bourgeois professional Parisian couple, and murders the two children in her care. It caused a huge stir globally, won the Prix Goncourt (she was the first Moroccan woman to win the prize), and caught the attention of Emmanuel Macron, who appointed Slimani his representative for the “promotion of French language and culture”. Lullaby is a shocking and affecting book but, in the end, confusing. Suspenseful tension depends too much on our helpless fascination with the facts of the
