My Husband, the debut novel by Maud Ventura, translated from the original French by Emma Ramadan, is a slow moving, intense and deliciously dark psychological portrait of a marriage and domestic dynamic; a marriage of games and rules, offences and corresponding punishments, of hypothetical drama… all in our narrator’s head alone. The novel opens strong, presenting us with an intriguing woman preserved in an immaculate shell who, on the surface, has everything; but who is also an overthinker who microscopically analyses her husband’s every gesture; who likes things on perfect display, neat, ordered and categorised to a fault; and yet there is a resounding void. Her love and excessive passion for her husband is all-consuming, engulfing, negating the need for anything or anyone else beyond him; but she’s starting to feel like this feeling isn’t mutual, and she doesn’t like it. 

Contained, mostly set in their home and at times almost seeming like a one-woman play, there are still twists and turns a-plenty in this one. In the opening pages Ventura deftly sets up a sense of the calm before the storm; a storm which eventually comes in the form of a clementine. 

Swaying between the darkly funny, the neurotic, the downright dark, and the tragic, My Husband is a compulsive read exploring themes of infatuation and the bizarre, twisted logic that it can induce; of control and communication, or lack thereof; and of what happens when love goes too far, or doesn’t give enough.

A unique read, with a quietly explosive ending; I loved this.

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My Husband is published by Hutchinson Heinemann on July 27th 2023.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for my eARC.

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Maud Ventura lives in Paris. She led the podcast division of one of France’s major radio stations and speaks fluent English. My Husband, her first novel, was a bestseller in France and winner of the Prix du Premier Roman.

Emma Ramadan (translator) is the recipient of the PEN Translation Prize, the Albertine Prize, an NEA Fellowship, and a Fulbright Scholarship. She lives in Brooklyn.