Irene Nemirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903, the daughter of a successful Jewish banker. In 1918 her family fled the Russian Revolution for France where she became a bestselling novelist, author of David Golder, Le Bal and other works published in her lifetime or soon after, as well as the posthumous Suite Francaise and Fire in the Blood. In July 1942 she was arrested by the French police and interned in Pithiviers concentration camp, and from there immediately deported to Auschwitz where she died in August 1942.
Nemirovsky's last stories are a living history of the occupation, written in real time * Sunday Times * A coolly crafted traditional family novel -- A S Byatt * Guardian * Nemirovsky's great bourgeois tragedy is modest in scale but epic in scope. Her highly distinctive style, the delicate but relentless accretion of finely observed detail, produces a story in which universal cataclysm mirrored in apparently insignificant personal destiny, to extraordinary resonant effect -- Jane Shilling * Sunday Telegraph * A remarkable novel...beautifully translated... Her voice, compassionate yet always shrewd, with its sharp portrait of France at war and during the optimistic and confused Twenties and early Thirties, is always distinctive * Literary Review * A gorgeous novel - witty, tender and true * Financial Times *