Suite Francaise

This remarkable bestseller, already hailed as one of the great works of French literature in the 20th century, actually consists of three books: two novellas, and the non-fiction account of their creation and improbable survival. In 1941, Irene Nemirovsky, a Jewish writer, and her husband joined their children in a French village to escape from the German occupation of Paris. By July 1942, she was arrested by French police and sent to Auschwitz; she was dead by August. In that single year, Nemirovsky accomplished a nearly impossible feat: at breakneck speed she penned two novellas about the terrible events still unfolding in France. Her two children survived the war by hiding in attics and basements, and they carried their mother's manuscript with them. It was not until the late 1990's that the eldest daughter, now in her 70's, finally read the crumbling notes and realized that they were not merely a diary, but two fully formed works of fiction, the earliest literature ever written about World War II--written while events were actually happening. The first, STORM IN JUNE is a cacophonous, frightening, and frequently comic account of the mass exodus from Paris in 1940; the second, DOLCE, tells the story of a French village living uneasily under German occupation. It's a miracle that these novellas exist at all, but the greater miracle is that, amidst upheaval and danger, Nemirovsky somehow created work of such insight, richness, menace, and beauty.