Published on August 19 by Actes Sud, Nous aussi, the third novel in twenty years by Anne Godard, professor of literature at Sorbonne Nouvelle, explores the buried memory of a family from the upper Catholic bourgeoisie of the 5th arrondissement of Paris.
A collective "we" to express the family illusion
The novel opens with a first-person plural narrative, this "we" which initially signifies belonging to a large, united, and privileged family unit, before gradually serving to express its disintegration. Anne Godard explains that she chose this "one" as the ideal instrument to make manifest both the collective and the impersonal, the confusion of roles within the clan, constructing her novel like a puzzle whose pieces are only visible from the outside, once one has stepped outside the whole.
After a devastating event that strikes the family, the narrator gradually recovers the memory of an event that occurred years earlier, uncovering a trauma that remained buried for thirty years under the illusion of social perfection.
A rare author, ten years after her previous novel
This third text follows *L'Inconsolable*, published in 2006 by Minuit and awarded the RTL-Lire Grand Prize, and then *Une chance folle* in 2017, also by Minuit. All of Anne Godard's work, a professor of literature and creative writing, revolves around this same theme of self-construction through the progressive dismantling of the family narrative inherited from childhood.
Nous aussi is part of a 2026 literary season marked by 461 new novels, alongside other highly anticipated titles such as Le Palais by François-Henri Désérable or L'Inconnue du quai de Javel by Philippe Jaenada.
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