Marie NDiaye’s latest novel to be translated, That Time of Year, appears to be a relatively straightforward thriller: Herman’s wife, Rose, and his unnamed child go missing during their vacation after staying past the end of tourist season, and it’s up to Herman to determine their whereabouts. But by shrouding her relatively simple narrative in a few compelling dichotomies—town and city, belonging and otherness, remembrance and forgetting—NDiaye constructs a suspenseful, surreal, and nightmarish novel. Its sense of dread is apparent just nine pages in, when, not long into his search, Herman correctly suspects that “by waiting one day too long to go home and thus breaking with a ten-year habit, by letting September come to them when September was a month they knew only in Paris, he and Rose had laid themselves open to unknown tribulations they might not be strong enough to withstand.” As he remarks later, he and Rose “had no sense of what fall means here.” ... The novel’s gigantic sense of dread is woven largely by way of its masterful and restrained prose. NDiaye tells Herman’s tale with a stark frankness that allows the reader to notice when specific words are repeated... Over the course of the novel, “interesting” inspires a kind of paradoxical apprehension wherever it is read, as if just beneath the surface of the word lie the secrets to the bizarreness of the village. What other horrors could lurk in a town where bureaucratic renovations are more interesting than disappearances? ... As Herman struggles to keep his family in sight while he is lured by the siren song of the village, That Time of Year emerges as a tale of pastoral idyll gone horribly wrong.

That Time of Year — originally published in France in 1994 and now translated for the first time into English by NDiaye’s frequent collaborator Jordan Stump — arrives this year as a thrilling new entry in NDiaye’s catalog in English.... NDiaye’s psychologically unnerving touch conjures, among others, Shirley Jackson. Jackson’s short story “The Summer People"....NDiaye transports the reader through an uncanny world where sometimes space and reality feel as though they function the same as our own, and other times they wobble.... NDiaye and Gladman are, in ways that are both evocative and elusive, rich commentators on the outsider experience. In their stories, race as a variable of estrangement often feels possible but is almost never confirmed.

What at first appears to be a Kafkaesque fable about insiders and outsiders quickly morphs into a metaphysical horror story about the bonds between the living and the dead. As with Kafka, there is a sense of an allegory that cannot be pinned down, a multiplicity of meanings that resonate in such a way that interpreting the text is like trying to make sense of a nightmare.... Not surprisingly perhaps, That Time of Year ends abruptly, in a manner that is open-ended yet somehow just right. This is the kind of book that will frustrate a certain type of reader and delight others, especially those with a bent for the innovative and indeterminate.

French writer Ndiaye (The Cheffe) serves up a blistering critique of bourgeois French society in this eerie tale.... Everything Herman once found important—his job, family, ambition, even his personal appearance—slides away as he loses touch with himself, “no longer troubling to determine the date.” Ndiaye pulls off a fascinating group portrait of the town, capturing the shifts in behavior of each character in relation to the power they hold or are beholden to. Her chilling tale offers a powerful chronicle of the failure of one man’s will.

Utterly compelling in tone, plot, and style, this slim, sleek story has a veneer of sly sophistication that belies the horror of malignancy within the village and Herman himself. Part ghost story, part satiric horror, this gorgeously eerie book will keep you holding your breath even past the end.