About the Book

“For me, the greatest joy is knowing that the book is being read. It is an extraordinary feeling to have brought my mother back to life. It shows that the Nazis did not truly succeed in killing her. It is not vengeance, but it is a victory.” — Denise Epstein in an interview with the BBC

Arguably the greatest story within the pages of Irene Nemirovsky’s final, posthumous book is an account of how it came to exist in the first place. Scribbled in a leather-bound notebook while on the run in an occupied nation, hidden in a suitcase and unread for more than half a century, discovered only decades later by a daughter fearful of reading her mother’s final thoughts, and finally published to critical, worldwide acclaim.

That is Suite Francaise, a book whose very existence provides testimony to a writer’s determination to tell the story of her adopted country even as her life was torn asunder and ultimately taken from her. Planned as a series of five novellas set in occupied France under Nazi rule, the book contains only the first two stories and notes for a third. Nemirovsky was tracked down, arrested and sent to the death camps before she could finish the rest. It wouldn’t be until 2004 that the world would read Nemirovsky’s final work and marvel at her ability to tell the story even as she lived its horrors.

“Suite Française can stand up to the most rigorous and objective analysis, while a knowledge of its history heightens the wonder and awe of reading it,” The New York Times wrote in a review of the book upon its translation into English in 2006. “The improbable survival of her two novellas is a cause for celebration and also for grief at another reminder of the horrors of the Holocaust. (Nemirovsky) wrote what may be the first work of fiction about what we now call World War II. She also wrote, for all to read at last, some of the greatest, most humane and incisive fiction that conflict has produced.”