Leila Slimani Books in Order

If you want the breakout psychological thriller: The Perfect Nanny / Lullaby
If you want the sharp early novel about desire and self-destruction: Adèle
If you want the family saga set in Morocco: In the Country of Others → Watch Us Dance
If you want her nonfiction on sex, secrecy, and women's lives: Sex and Lies

Leila Slimani was born in Rabat, Morocco, in 1981 and grew up in a French-speaking family. She did her schooling in Rabat, and family life also took her beyond the city, including holidays on her grandparents' farm outside Meknes. Those early experiences, city and countryside, privilege and tension, Morocco and France, would later feed directly into her fiction.

At 17, she left Morocco for Paris, a move that gave her both distance from home and a clearer view of it.

In Paris she studied political science and, after university, worked as a journalist for Jeune Afrique for five years. Reporting on North Africa kept her close to public life, but she eventually left the magazine to write fiction full time. A writing workshop with editor Jean-Marie Laclavetine helped her bring that first novel into focus.

That debut became Adèle, first published in 2014. It follows a Paris journalist whose outwardly successful life, surgeon husband, child, nice apartment, is undercut by compulsive desire and private despair. Right away, Slimani showed what she does so well: she takes a respectable surface and quietly pulls it apart.

She writes about women who are judged, watched, underestimated, or trapped by roles that are supposed to make them happy.

Her wider breakout came with The Perfect Nanny, the tense Paris-set novel that won the Prix Goncourt in 2016, making her the first Moroccan woman to receive the prize. The setup is simple and frightening: a couple hires a nanny who seems perfect, until the arrangement turns toxic. Readers often come for the suspense, then stay for the sharper questions underneath, about class, care work, motherhood, race, and power inside the home.

Slimani's journalism never really disappeared. In Sex and Lies, she draws on conversations with women in Morocco to write about secrecy, sexual rules, double standards, and the gap between public morality and private life. The book sits somewhere between reportage, testimony, and essay, and it makes clear that her interest in intimacy is also political.

Then she opened the frame wider. In the Country of Others and Watch Us Dance turn to family history, following an interracial family across postwar and newly independent Morocco. Through Mathilde, Amine, and their children, Slimani writes about love, land, ambition, belonging, colonialism, and the compromises people make to survive. The books are broader in scope than her early novels, but they still care about the small stuff too: who gets to leave, who has to stay, who is seen as an outsider, and who gets to feel at home.

A lot of her work circles the same stubborn question: how do you become free without cutting yourself off from everyone around you? That question shows up in marriages, in motherhood, in social class, in migration, and in the way countries tell stories about themselves. Even when her fiction is dark, it stays close to daily life, bedrooms, offices, schoolyards, farms, kitchens, which is part of why it feels so immediate.

Outside her books, Slimani has remained publicly engaged on feminism, sexual rights, immigration, and racism, and she has also served as a representative for the promotion of the French language and culture. More recent publisher biographies say she divides her time between France and Portugal. That feels fitting for a writer so interested in border crossings, mixed identities, and the uneasy business of belonging.