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“Aux jeunes filles, on demande de tourner la salade. On observe, on surveille les projections d’huile sur la nappe blanche, la honte d’une feuille qui serait tombée hors du plat. Si elle a réussi, on lui dit qu’elle est bonne à marier. Une fois servis, on ne coupe pas les feuilles, on les replie entre fourchette et couteau, on en fait un portefeuille qui entrera dans la bouche mi-ouverte.”
Anne Godard (born 1971) has published three novels in twenty years, each after nearly a decade of silence. Her first, L'Inconsolable, appeared in 2006 at Éditions de Minuit and received the Grand Prix RTL-Lire. Une chance folle followed in 2017 and was awarded the Prix Alain-Spiess. With Nous aussi, published in August 2026 by Actes Sud, she changed both publisher and scale: the novel received the Prix Décembre, and the Prix des Libraires de Nancy-Le Point. It was also among the final selections for the Prix Goncourt, the Médicis, the Fémina, and it was undoubtedly the most discussed novel of the fall 2026’s rentrée littéraire. Godard is also an academic and has held editorial positions at several major French publishing houses.
The novel is written entirely in the first person plural. “On fait partie d'une grande famille. On sait qu'on est privilégiés.” The setting is a Haussmannian apartment building in the intellectual Quartier Latin in Paris, a family-owned château for the summers, Catholic faith passed down like silverware, inherited convictions, shared tastes, good schools—the quiet certainty of belonging exactly where one should. The collective pronoun holds the family together as a single organism, and for much of the book no individual voice manages to break through its surface. There is something seductive in this “on,” something warm and enveloping; only gradually does the reader begin to feel what it conceals and what it costs.
When allegations of incest surface within this closed world, the collective voice does not fracture: it tightens. The family absorbs the accusation the way the apartment absorbs sound, and rearranges itself around the unspeakable without ever acknowledging it. Godard traces the mechanisms of denial as the natural consequence of a group that values cohesion above all: togetherness becomes captivity; loyalty, complicity; and the pronoun that once sounded like warmth begins to read as erasure. What makes Nous aussi so unsettling is its patience; it never rushes toward confrontation, content instead to show how a family can know and not know at the same time.
Godard writes in long, accumulative sentences whose controlled rhythm mirrors the slow certainties of the world they describe. Where a novel on this subject might have relied on testimony or confession, Nous aussi reconstructs the grammar of silence from within. The question it poses is how the family’s collective voice draws the boundaries of what can be seen, said, and survived. As the novel puts it: “le jour où la façade s'est fissurée, on n'a pas compris.”
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TRIGGER WARNING: The novel deals with incest and its concealment within a family. There are no graphic descriptions of sexual acts, but the subject is at the heart of the narrative and its emotional weight is sustained throughout. The book also addresses self-destructive behavior.