Suite Francaise

Suite Francaise was written by Irene Nemirovsky while the events it describes were still unfolding, and it was published decades later. The first part follows the exodus of June 1940, when the roads out of Paris filled with French families of every kind fleeing the German advance, and it catches both the small cowardices of a population in disarray and the fragile moments of solidarity that appeared alongside them. The second part moves to the village of Bussy, which is required to billet a German garrison, and watches the resentments between neighbours take on new life under occupation.

Nemirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903 and lived more than half her life in France, writing in French, but she was denied French nationality. She was arrested as a Jew under the racial laws, which took no account of her conversion to Roman Catholicism, and died in Auschwitz in 1942 at the age of thirty-nine. The manuscript she left behind was kept through the war years and only reached print long afterwards, appearing as Suite Francaise and establishing her reputation in English.

Nemirovsky had published a substantial body of fiction before the war, but she is best known for the posthumously published Suite Francaise.