(Fiction; Chatto & Windus, 2006; Knopf, 2006)
Begun while she and her family were fleeing the Germans in 1940, Suite Française is the first two parts of an intended five-part novel. Némirovsky was a born in Kiev in 1903 and emigrated to France in 1919; by the beginning of World War II she was the celebrated author of two novels. But with the armistice and the French government’s collaborationist turn, Némirovsky, a Jew, was shunned by the French literary establishment and could no longer publish under her own name.
