This was a (very) quick read, but packs a punch. I don't think I've ever read a book with a character like Adele at the centre—although her male equivalent is practically a staple of literary fiction—as it was almost as if Slimani was going out of her way to make her unlikable, simply by reporting the contents of Adele's head with no filter. Nothing happens, yet it's strangely compelling.

I also enjoyed the clean, clear-cut descriptions of whatever Adele was wearing—"a pair of old jeans and a man's cashmere sweater"; "skintight jeans, a black t-shirt and one of her mother's bras"; "a pair of men's trousers and a sweater cut low in the back", etc. At one point she wears "a slightly old-fashioned jacket", a description that particularly tickled me. More of this in literature, please.

Adele - Leila Slimani (translated by Sam Taylor)
After reading and loving Lullaby (which for some reason has been renamed The Perfect Nanny), I knew Leila Slimani was going to be one of my go to authors. Adele is her debut novel, which, thanks to the success of Lullaby/The Perfect Nanny, has now been translated and released in English. Despite my excitement at getting ARC of this some months ago, I only just got around to reading it. My bad. I am easily distracted.

Adèle appears to have the perfect life: She is a successful journalist in Paris who lives in a beautiful apartment with her surgeon husband and their young son. But underneath the surface, she is bored--and consumed by an insatiable need for sex. Driven less by pleasure than compulsion, Adèle organizes her day around her extramarital affairs, arriving late to work and lying to her husband about where she's been, until she becomes ensnared in a trap of her own making. Suspenseful, erotic, and electrically charged, Adèle is a captivating exploration of addiction, sexuality, and one woman's quest to feel alive.

Ok, so I know it's not fair to compare books, but I need to in order to show you guys how good Leila Slimani is at getting to the darker undercurrent of society. In Lullaby/The Perfect Nanny/Whatever the name is, we open with a horrific event and work backwards. You know nothing is ats it seems, and yet everything seems to perfect and ordinary. With Adele, we are dropped into the middle of the drama, the perfection is revealed as an illusion right from the start. A fun, easy read isn't what you're going to get here, but a dark, riveting, almost poetic exploration of the darker side of humanity is what you'll get here.
Apparently, Adele is based on real-life events, with the Dominque Strauss-Khan scandal being cited by the author as the inspiration behind this. I had no idea who that was, but a little research told me that he was a French politician who was described as being a sex addict, which is what made Leila Slimani want to look at what life would be like for a female sex addict. Considering female sexuality is still somewhat taboo this was as interesting as it is disturbing.
Adele will literally go after all and every man she passes for gratification, business colleagues, family friends, her best mate's boyfriend... She doesn't care who it is as long as she can get what she wants. She's married but unsatisfied with her normal comfortable life, she isn't a likable character and while I know addiction is an awful disease and I feel for anyone suffering with it, I couldn't sympathise with Adele at all. I just can't, she's loathsome.I'm still not sure what I think of this book now I'm done with it, but what I am sure of is that this was interesting and beautifully written and Leila Slimani has really cemented herself as a bold and brave writer who isn't afraid to tackle difficult subjects. This was published in the UK in January, so is available from bookstores now!

Adele seems to have a great life. She is married to a surgeon; they have a healthy young son. She's a successful journalist. She has everything she ever wanted. But she's grown bored with her job and distant from her husband. She loves her son, but hates that he is keeping her tied to a life she no longer wants.
The Book was ok but not the best, I feel I didn't care to much about what happened to the characters, but something kept me reading so maybe it will grow on me the more I think about it.

This was a good read, tense, psychological, unforgettable.
I would recommend this to people who love reading uncomfortable, disturbing stories, a novel like a punch in the gut.

Slimani isn't afraid to address the darker side of the human nature.

Adele is outwardly a happy mother of a young son married to a successful doctor. She also has a career as a journalist specialising in Middle Eastern affairs, particularly Tunisia. She seems to have all the ingredients for a contented life.

However Adele has a secret alternative life which is dangerous and self -destructive in that she has a sex addiction which puts her at risk.

Slimani never offers explanations for her behaviour but keeps it as complicated and obscure for the reader as it is for Adele herself.

As a trained counsellor I I have noticed that people who are sexually abused often suffer from lack of self worth and seek to gain "attention" through self -destructive patterns of behaviour, sometimes through a form of sex addiction. I did wonder if Adele might be like this?

However it is the thrill of the moment that equates with what happens to other addicts. Gamblers' brains have been shown to alter during the "rush" of placing a bet etc. Maybe for Adele it's about power over men ?

Slimani is brave to address a "taboo" subject again as unflinchingly as she did in "Lullaby" and explore the darkness which lies underneath the surface.
Disturbing but compelling.

This book, like Lullaby, is an uncomfortable read. Slimani pulls no punches with her tale of a women who has hit the self destruct button. It left me feeling uncomfortable and not quite knowing what to think of the main character. Whilst it was a tough read in many ways, it was delightfully easy to read and it took me no time to get through it as the story was so compelling!

Adele is a somewhat bleak and transgressive read. On the face of it, Adele has the ideal life. She has a chic apartment, a good job, a loving husband and a son. Adele, however, is deeply bored and sad in her life.
To make herself feel something, anything, she is compelled into degrading sexual encounters. None of them make her happy , often not even in the moment of the act. It is like any addiction. She doesn't care who it hurts as long as she gets her fix.
It is very honestly written, and there are no answers provided. We see how she was neglected by her mother as a child, and favoured by her father. It can only end one way, resulting in pain for her family. It is incredibly well told, as was Lullaby, her other novel. Four stars.

“Will you recommend this book/author to your readers?” asks Netgalley, and I responded yes, if only because I’m interested in other people’s thoughts on this novel about Adèle, sex addict and unhappy wife and mother. I felt curiously unmoved by the stories of her sexual conquests, Adèle’s disconnectedness transferring to me as a reader. I found it a depressing (and to me, very unerotic), story. It was most interesting (and depressing) when you learned of Adèle’s family and her miserable mother. What came across to me was how sex addiction is like any other addiction: all consuming, numbing and damaging not only to the addict but also to those around them. Ultimately, thought provoking, and worth reading for that aspect alone.

Adèle is a woman living an apparently privileged life in Paris, working as a journalist, married to a surgeon. But she feels a deep sense of emptiness which she expresses through sexual addiction. This leads her to incessantly, obsessively, lie, let people down and place herself in danger.

The premise is fascinating and the voice is sharp and stylish. We follow Adèle’s relentless rumination, the way she harms those who care about her, the recklessness, the feverish highs, the sense of emptiness.

Sex for Adèle is bleak and deeply unerotic, in fact disgust for her casual partners is almost a prerequisite. As soon as she has what she craves, she no longer wants it. She longs to feel safe and cared for, but constantly takes risks.

However I thought ultimately the book was disappointing and has an unfinished feel. Strands of the story were set up but never followed through. Elements of the plot, such as it is, felt unconvincing or introduced purely to shock.

I didn’t expect a pat explanation or a neat resolution, but I wanted to feel that something in the character or the author or me had shifted. Instead I was left bemused.

I remember when Lullaby, Slimani’s first novel was translated in English it exploded here in the UK (as much as any literary fiction title can in a populist world) and I keep meaning to read it. When Adele came up on NetGalley I requested it straight away and was really excited when I was accepted.

We meet Adele whilst she is in the throes of sex addiction, desperately trying to find a union that will fulfil her desires. The synopsis tells readers that she appears to have a perfect life, but because it is narrated in first person we never see that projection out in the world. What we observe is a woman who is bored with her life; who feels a huge void inside herself and the truth is that sex will never fulfil her.

Adele holds all her conquests at a distance, and moves from lover to lover with the efficiency and emotional coldness usually observed for men in fiction. I can’t decide whether if this were a story about a man it would have a very different tone – perhaps he would be a ‘stud’, or seen as ‘untameable’ – but for a woman she is constantly reminded about the guilt she should be feeling about not supporting her husband or loving her child more.

I don’t mean this as a criticism to the author; it’s a really interesting look at how stereotypical roles are subconsciously internalised. Although she is the eponymous character, Adele is not a singular study of her feelings, and although it does mainly focus on how she she is affected by the world and her reaction to it, it is also about how she affects the lives of those she uses.

Her husband Richard is presented as her juxtaposition. He doesn’t really get a voice until much later in the novel, and when he does it completely overrides Adele’s, controlling and cruel. And perhaps they are not that different – Adele is certainly a novel about obsession and a hunger for a satiation that can never come if you’re looking in the wrong place.

I have so far said the Adele is so many things because you will find a murky depth of emotion and grit, and but overall it is a character study that does not stop to ponder or pontificate, it moves with an efficient swiftness. Everything in the novel is so honest, but not painfully so; from her inability to create loving relationships, to her husbands frank feelings about sex, I couldn’t tear myself away. It could have felt cheap, sex for the sake of it, but it doesn’t. For the amount of lovers Adele has had there is very little sex in the book, yet the implication of it smothers everything she does.

There were so, so many lines in this novel that I highlighted and must admit that it has been a long time since I felt the pull of reading as much as with Adele. I could zone out pretty much anything around me just to focus on the compelling brutality of her life. To say that she causes everything to happen in the novel is a great source of debate in my head at the moment, and I can’t decide how much of her compulsions control what she does; how far free will exists in the novel.

What I have decided is that Adele is a must read if you value the type of fiction that is truthful and will make you think. Although it is hard for me to narrow down the quotes from the novel I think will sum it up the most, I will leave you with this, in the hope that you will begin to understand the beauty of this novel:

“Never since that evening – not in the arms of men, nor during the walks she took years later on the same boulevard – has she rediscovered that magical feeling of actually touching the vile and the obscene, the heart of bourgeois perversion and human wretchedness”.

~ ADELE, LAILA SLIMANI

~ I was given an advance reader copy of this title in exchange for an honest review, I'm not associated with the author or publisher in any way and the views expressed are completely unbiased and entirely my own. ~

My rating: 2.5*

'Adèle' is the latest offering from Leïla Slimani, author of bestseller 'Lullaby' (aka 'The Perfect Nanny')

On the surface it appears that our main character has the 'perfect' life in Paris with her doctor husband, toddler son and a thriving career as a journalist. Unbeknownst to those around her, however, Adèle is contending with an all-consuming sexual addiction.

I've seen this novel categorized as 'erotic fiction' but on that point I'd have to disagree. There isn't anything sexually gratifying about Adèle's encounters at all, and I don't think there's meant to be. It seems to be the thrill of infidelity that drives her behaviour, and often once she's 'succeeded' in seducing someone (anyone) her desire immediately evaporates.

I could be wrong, but to me this novel draws parallels with literary realism classic 'Madame Bovary' by Gustave Flaubert, in the respect that it depicts the life of a woman who marries a doctor and proceeds to chase thrills elsewhere to escape the banality of her existence. Except in the case of Adèle, it happens to be a compulsive need for extramarital sexual encounters.

While intellectually I understand what the author is conveying through this work, my main criticism would be a lack of engagement for us, the reader. Adèle is such an unlikable character and her activities are described so starkly, which, however intentional, just isn't too compelling as a reading experience. However, I will say that at just over 200 pages this is quick, easy enough read in that respect, and it's entirely possible to finish it in one sitting.

If you're looking for sexy times, this novel won't be for you! Rather it's a stark exploration of sex addiction and one womans exercise in self-destruction.

~ Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to review this title. ~

Having read Leïla Slimani’s Lullaby last year, I was keen to try her new novel, Adèle. Like Lullaby, this takes us beyond the polished facade of a comfortable, upper-middle-class Parisian family and shows us the hypocrisy and unhappiness within. This time our protagonists are Adèle, a journalist, and her husband Richard, a successful surgeon. They have a son, Lucien, and spend Christmas holidays with Richard’s wealthy family in the country. It’s a superficially perfect existence; but there are cracks beneath the surface. Adèle, the beautiful, serene, accomplished wife, hides a dark secret: ever since she was a child, she has been a sex addict, compulsively seeking out sensual experiences with as many people as she can, using these moments to anchor herself against the great, vast meaninglessness of the world. Yet Adèle’s time is running out and, when she makes a pass at a colleague of Richard’s, her whole carefully-constructed world is about to collapse.


Adèle is exhausted. Her marriage to Richard was supposed to give her a new start – a life away from her parents’ cramped home in Boulogne, with a loving husband and a little boy to cherish. But nothing has worked out as it was supposed to. Rendered complacent by his low sex drive, Richard doesn’t give her the attention she needs to feel alive and so she frequently cruises Paris’s streets and bars in search of men who are willing to make her feel vivid and desired. As time passes, she needs more and more in order to feel satisfied. As she pushes further in search of that elusive (and unattainable) completion, she risks not only the security of her marriage but her own personal safety – and not only her physical safety but also her mental stability, as the strain of keeping up a double life begins to take its toll on her. The situation can’t last – but how can it be resolved?

Slimani elegantly avoids pointing the finger at either Adèle or Richard. Their marriage clearly isn’t satisfying, but that can be blamed on both of them: Adèle’s restlessness and her refusal to seek therapy on her own account; and Richard’s comfortable assumption that his wife is all right with his indifference to sex. Indeed, at one point Slimani notes that Richard thought Adèle would be relieved, as an intelligent woman, to be freed of a man pestering her for physical favours. There are a whole load of gender assumptions floating around here which are not helpful or true and, as Slimani shows, have contributed to the tragic disintegration of a (manifestly ill-matched) marriage. Yet Richard, to give him credit, comes through. With determination (and a good deal of naivete), he believes that he can make Adèle better and he embarks on a mission to do just that – although whether he can possibly succeed remains to be seen.

I don’t for a moment doubt that sex addiction is a troubling and distressing mental illness. I have read other accounts of it and, like any condition that causes compulsive behaviour, it must be terrifying and dehumanising. My difficulty in empathising with Slimani’s characters is not the nature of the illness they’re battling. It’s just that this is a story of beautiful, rich people battling a problem in attractive surroundings, with a lovely country house to retreat to, and enough money to tackle therapy and everything else. Perhaps it didn’t help that I was reading this at the same time as What Hell is Not, which makes Adèle feel like a piece of edgy bourgeois voyeurism: a sort of Belle du Jour for the modern era (‘bored Parisian wife has gritty sex with men plucked off the street to give meaning to her dull middle-class existence’). And yet, despite that, we are drawn to empathise to some extent with Adèle’s plight: her efforts to change and the tiny events that can snowball, like the beginning of an avalanche, to undo her resolve.

Another intriguing book from Slimani, which peels away the sheen of the Parisian bourgeoisie to reveal the raw human passions struggling within, but which, unfortunately, didn’t make a strong impact on me.

For the review, please see my blog:
https://theidlewoman.net/2019/02/15/adele-leila-slimani/

Adèle has a chic apartment in the sought after suburbs of modern day Paris. She has a job as a successful journalist, a handsome surgeon for a husband and a scrumptious little toddler boy. One could say that Adèle has it all, except there is a problem; Adèle is bored; Adèle is frustrated; Adèle is a sex addict.

Adèle’s willingness and tendency to detonate her self destruct button both frequently and without warning, means she has to envelope her normal life around her secret affairs and one night stands; to hide her sordid second life; to conceal her true self.

The combination of Slimani’s wonderfully descriptive prose together with the elegant flow and sumptuous descriptions of Adèle’s Parisian life made this a quick and enjoyable read. This book is neither seedy nor superficial; it is not full of gratuitous sex but neither is it reserved.

I found this to be a powerful and dark exploration of addiction from the perspective of a very troubled woman; a fascinating insight into Adèle’s privileged world that somehow leaves her wanting more.

I have a feeling this will be a Marmite book - I thoroughly enjoyed it as the narrative is so beautifully written. I felt it to be complex and absorbing; simple yet devastating. I have not yet read Lullaby (also by Slimani) but will certainly be purchasing it on my next trip to the bookshop.

My thanks go to Faber & Faber and Netgalley for providing me with an ARC copy of this novel in return for an honest review. Adèle was published in hardback on 7th February 2019.

I Loved the authors book Lullaby, so was really excited to dive into this one.

A tale of addiction,... this is the story of a Parisian lady who seems to have it all...... but she hides a dark secret, dark desire and a feeling of emptiness.
This book was a quick read, the ending fell a little short for me though.

Thank you to the Author Netgalley and the publisher for allowing me to read
3 and half stars.

Thanks to NetGalley and The Publisher for this eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Adele seemingly has the perfect life. A surgeon for a husband, a beautiful baby boy, a successful career as Journalist, a fabulous Paris apartment, but yet still she is empty.inside. Adele has a compulsion, one she will do anything for and risks all she has but once she gives in she is never satisfied. Adele is a sex addict.

Adele's story is told in a very clinical way. There is no emotion and no reason. It's dark and quite repulsive and certainly graphic. But there is an underlying intrigue, and a want to find out why she is the way she is. There are hints of things but nothing is every fully confirmed. So much remains untold. Having said that, I'm glad it was a short read. I'm not sure that I could take much more of her self torment, but I was compelled to get to the end of her story. The only problem is I'm still not sure if I have. And for that I have to congratulate the author for.

One of last year’s biggest literary breakouts was Leila Slimani’s Prix Goncourt winning novel “Lullaby” (known in the US as “The Perfect Nanny”). Her novel “Adele” was published in France before “Lullaby”, but it’s only now been translated and published in English. The heroine of this novel’s title is a journalist and mother with a steady husband. She appears normal and content, but running parallel to this stable life she has a secret existence filled with unruly passion and illicit affairs. She lazily does her job and barely musters the energy to get to the office every day. She resents her child and is turned off by her husband. All her passion is poured into furtive moments where men unleash their desire upon her because “Her only ambition is to be wanted.” This seemingly chaotic double life is untenable and there must be a breaking point.

Even though Adele’s case is extreme, her story is extremely relatable for the way we all harbour secret passions that we keep carefully concealed from those closest to us. She frequently resolves to turn her life around and devote more time to her husband and son, but finds herself drawn back into seedy behaviour because “Her obsessions devour her. She is helpless to stop them.” I admire how the psychological motivations for her behaviour are never neatly explained and there’s no clear-cut course of action or treatment to “solve” her habits. Instead, the novel shifts at one point to include the husband’s perspective more and shows how he has psychological hang ups as well which are preventing full intimacy and disclosure between them.

While it may not have the depth and poeticism of a novel like Garth Greenwell’s “What Belongs to You” which similarly explores the dynamics of someone driven by desire, I appreciated Slimani’s frankness in showing how eroticism can come to rule someone’s life. Adele isn’t driven by pleasure so much as a confrontation with mortality and a submission to the mechanisms of the body. This novel is a vivid study of how sometimes the relationships which are meant to support us are the ones which can lead to the annihilation of our innermost selves.

I really loved Leila Slimani's last book Lullaby / The Perfect Nanny and was really looking forward to her next.

Adele did not disappoint. The plot hooked me from the start, and similarly with her previous book, it's engaging and twisted.

The story ended abruptly and I felt that there was space for more however it was in keeping with the theme of the narrative.

4 stars.

Thanks to NetGalley, Leila Slimani and Faber and Faber for my copy in exchange for an honest review.

⭐️⭐️⭐️
This is a difficult one for me as it is quite different from any of the books I’ve read of late. The story is focussed around a woman, Adèle who is addicted to sex but not with her husband. From the outside she has a steady job, a child and a husband who has a job that supports a very healthy lifestyle. One might think this would make Adèle happy but it almost accomplished the opposite.

When Adèle was 10 years old her mother and a gentleman took her to a red light district in Paris as part of a city tour. This is where Adele first experiences a “mix of fear and longing, disgust and arousal.” There is a power to Adèle’s sexual prowess that she doesn’t get anywhere else. Adèle treats this addiction with much seriousness in her constant scheduling checks and fastidious care of all the details of her “dates.” But can this behaviour be sustainable?

I am certainly no prude but the blatant erotic content was a bit distracting from the story itself. The character of Adèle was written in a manner that the reader felt the anxiety that Adèle felt. I expected more a thriller type story based on the description but this is not that. There was no big twist just an honest story of a woman and her marriage.

Thank you to @netgalley and @faberbooks for this book in exchange for an honest review.

Adele loves sex: with strangers; fat neighbours; colleagues; groups of men, in fact anyone except her husband. She seems to have made a basic mistake in marrying a man who prides himself on his lack of sex drive. For the first part of the book we are subjected to the gory details of Adele's not so wholesome hobby - how she only ends up with a sore vulva is beyond me, there is a long list of STDs that she has done well to avoid.

I was not sure if her husband knew but decided to keep quiet, or was a complete fool and did not question when she returned from a night on the tiles with ripped clothes and stinking of other people's bodily fluids. Turns out he wants a quiet life in the country and only turns nasty when Adele is less than enthusiastic about living in the middle of nowhere. At this point he suddenly wises up to why his wife is covered in bruises, scratches and smelling like a brothel.

None of the characters were likable, I did pity the poor child but that was it. The prose was laborious, whether this is the fault of the translation or the subject matter I am unsure. The whole thing felt like a rougher, grimier version of 'Fifty Shades', and with that in mind I will leave you with one of the sentences which made me giggle.

"He will no longer hear in his wife's vagina any other echoes but the blood that pulses there'.

It just made me want to shout 'Cooee' like a child going through as tunnel!

This is a deeply unpleasant book. It’s an exploration of sex addiction but in my view not a successful one. In fact, I quite fail to see the point of it as it doesn’t, in my view, offer any insight or understanding of the condition. Adele is a lacklustre journalist, married to a doctor and with a young son. An inner emptiness compels her to seek some sort of fulfilment in degrading, humiliating and often dangerous sexual encounters. Encounter after encounter is described in tedious detail. The story is narrated from Adele’s point of view and she comes across as shallow and self-obsessed, unwilling or unable to control her impulses. I found her completely unlikeable and unsympathetic, which surely defeats the object (if there is one) of the book as a serious attempt to make her compulsion believable, which might have engaged the reader’s sympathy. The author posits a couple of bleak childhood memories as the cause, but these are not traumatic enough to be convincing. It’s not at all a skilful character study, and any insight into female sexuality is sadly lacking. Adele’s actions are strangely regressive rather than subversive and ultimately tawdry and uninteresting. The marriage is also under-explored. Is it credible that the husband doesn’t notice there is something wrong? One has to assume there at least originally there was an attraction between them, but Adele’s attitude now seems to come out of nowhere. I’m sure there is place for an intelligent and illuminating study of sexual addiction in fiction, but this certainly isn’t it.