Leila Slimani's chilling best-selling novel Lullaby is being adapted into a movie
Leila Slimani's best-selling novel Lullaby is being adapted into a movie.
The book - also known as The Perfect Nanny in the US - follows mother-of-two Myriam, who is struggling with the mundanity of motherhood and decides to return to work as a lawyer.
While looking for the perfect nanny for their young son and daughter, Myrium and her husband never dreamed they would find Louise: a quiet, polite and devoted woman who sings to their children, cleans the family's chic Paris apartment, stays late without complaint and hosts enviable birthday parties.
But as the couple and their nanny become more and more dependent on each other, jealousy, resentment and suspicions increase, until Myriam and Paul's idyllic domesticity is shattered.
The chilling novel also touches on issues of race, social isolation, class and discrimination. Louise - like author Leila Slimani - is French-Moroccan and Leila creates a damning picture of a city where childcare workers are frequently immigrants, neglected, mistreated, and relegated to a social underclass.
Legendary will produce the movie with Why Not and Pan-Européenne, according to The Hollywood Reporter, which are currently in postproduction on the French-language adaptation of the novel.
So get reading now. We insist.
Lullaby was published in France via Gallimard in 2016. Leilia is the first Moroccan woman to win France's most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, which she won for Lullaby.
A journalist and frequent commentator on women's and human rights, she is French president Emmanuel Macron's personal representative for the promotion of the French language and culture. Born in Rabat, Morocco, in 1981, she lives in Paris with her French husband and their two young children.
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