Book review: Lullaby, by Leïla Slimani

This is a remarkable novel, for which Leïla Slimani won the Prix Goncourt, the French equivalent of the Man Booker Prize. It is dark, ambiguous, disturbing and arresting. Parts of it reminded me of Muriel Spark or Patricia Highsmith in its askance morality; at the same time it has the precision, the slight surrealism deployed to highlight reality and the questions about women, bodies and feminism that typify other French language writers, such as Marie Darrieussecq or Amélie Nothomb.