The High Low

Episode 43 is a pretty exciting one for The High Low - a bit of a pinch-me moment, if you will. One minute we were begging Faber & Faber for an advance copy of French novelist Leila Slimani’s cult read, Lullaby - a troubling but beautifully written read about a nanny who murders her two young charges - the next, we had Leila in our studio.The twelfth woman to win the Prix Goncourt, last year (the highest literary prize in France, previous winners include Proust) Lullaby sold a whopping 600,000 copies in Leila’s native France (under the title, ‘Chanson Douce’), led to Emmanuel Macron asking Leila to be the Minister for Culture (she turned it down) and the movie rights have, unsurprisingly, been snapped up. Comparisons with Gone Girl and Girl on a Train are crass - but indicative of the book’s breathtaking success. Leila talks to us about finding unexpected success with her “ little book” (“I thought my great book would be about war”), the societal role of working motherhood and the nanny (who is both