"Marie NDiaye is so intelligent, so composed, so good, that any description of her work feels like an understatement." —The New York Review of Books

Herman’s wife and child are nowhere to be found, and the weather in the village, perfectly agreeable just days earlier, has taken a sudden turn for the worse. Tourist season is over. It’s time for the vacationing Parisians, Herman and his family included, to abandon their rural getaways and return to normal life. But where has Herman’s family gone? Concerned, he sets out into the oppressive rain and cold for news of their whereabouts. The community he encounters, however, has become alien, practically unrecognizable, and his urgent inquiry, placed in the care of local officials, quickly recedes into the background, shuffled into a deck of labyrinthine bureaucracy and local custom. As time passes, Herman, wittingly and not, becomes one with a society defined by communal surveillance, strange traditions, ghostly apparitions, and a hospitality that verges on mania.

A literary horror story about power and assimilation, That Time of Year marks NDiaye once again as a contemporary master of the psychological novel. Working in the spirit of Leonora Carrington, Victor LaValle, and Kobo Abe, NDiaye’s novel is a nightmarish vision of otherness, privilege, and social amnesia, told with potent clarity and a heady dose of the weird.

Excerpt. � Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The president broke into a spirited laugh, patting Herman’s knee under the table. But Herman’s dismay had waned the moment he heard the receptionist’s name. Moved, he looked at her, and M�tilde smiled back with an air of genuine friendship.

“Yes, you’re going to help me,” Herman said to himself, “and then . . . ”

Flattered, happy, he was caught up in a sort of euphoria that made him want to talk to everyone around him, to explain himself, to earn their pity and esteem. When Charlotte came back and sat down, he leaned toward her and M�tilde, and in a voice loud and clear enough to be heard by everyone in the room he recounted at length what had happened to his family, his failure at the gendarmerie, the idea he’d first had of going to see the mayor. All the while, he studied the two women’s faces respectfully turned toward his, their eyes attentive, their brows thoughtful. A flood of joy washed over him, and he forgot to be ashamed of it as he told them of Rose and his little boy. He didn’t think anyone had ever listened to him so closely, so patiently, with such consideration and good will. Everyone around him had fallen silent. Frozen in mid-bow, Charlotte’s mother pressed the salad bowl to her belly, as if in prayer, meditative, drinking in Herman’s words. The corners of M�tilde’s mouth were delicately turned up in a caring little smile. Herman exulted in feeling so tragic: had anyone ever thought of him that way, had he ever, just once, moved someone? Then the thought of Rose turned abstract, supplanted by the intense pleasure of attracting the sympathy of the women around him, of holding their still unknown, obscure minds in his grip.

When he finished he glanced at the president. Alfred was contemplating him, leaning back in his chair. Herman couldn’t make out if he approved. But he was vaguely troubled, once again, by the strange, unpleasant sense of a syrupy wave of affection pouring from Alfred’s face, a face fleshy and severe as a watchful pasha’s, the moment Herman turned toward him, even briefly.

“Poor man,” his neighbor with the many pens remarked in a soft, melodious voice.

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