Bitter SUITE

Brand New on my booklog,
thanks to the fine folk of
FULLY BOOKED!!!



From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review.

Celebrated in pre-WWII France for her bestselling fiction,
the Jewish Russian-born author
was shipped to Auschwitz in the summer of 1942,
months after this long-lost masterwork was composed.

Irene Némirovsky,
a convert to Catholicism,
began a planned five-novel cycle as Nazi forces
overran northern France in 1940.

This gripping "suite,"
collecting the first two unpolished
but wondrously literary sections of a work cut short,
have surfaced more than six decades after her death.

The first, "Storm in June,"
chronicles the connecting lives of a disparate clutch of Parisians,
all fleeing city comforts for the chaotic countryside,
mere hours ahead of the advancing Germans.

The second, "Dolce,"
set in 1941 in a farming village under German occupation,
tells how peasant farmers, their pretty daughters and petit bourgeois collaborationists coexisted with their Nazi rulers.

In a workbook entry penned just weeks before her arrest,
Némirovsky noted that her goal was to describe "daily life,
the emotional life and especially the comedy it provides."

This heroic work does just that,
by focusing—with compassion and clarity—on individual human dramas.



Némirovsky's plan consisted of five parts.

She completed only the first two before she was murdered in Auschwitz.