Anne Godard's rentrée novel dissolves the family into pronouns

"Nous aussi," by Anne Godard, has emerged as one of the notable books of the 2026 rentrée littéraire, according to En attendant Nadeau, which calls it a striking novel about violence that was long kept silent, built on a form invented to strip a subject of its singularity and its ties to others.

France Culture, in its literary chronicle, describes the book as one of the season's major titles, one that works in short, incisive chapters to corrode the well-oiled mechanics of a bourgeois family. According to the broadcaster, the novel centers on a family secret and sexual violence, and stands out for its radical approach and the quality of its writing.

Both accounts point to the same device at the center of the book: pronouns. En attendant Nadeau frames the novel as a study in a kind of "dictatorship of pronouns," where a narrating subject is dispossessed of an individual voice. France Culture locates the same effect more specifically in the use of "on" — the impersonal, collective French pronoun — as a way of naming what a family cannot bring itself to say directly.

Neither outlet's summary offers plot details, page count, or publisher information, and none is given here. What both agree on is the novel's place in this year's rentrée: a title built around a formal experiment with grammar itself, used to approach a story of obstinate silence around sexual violence within a family.