Irène Némirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903. At the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, she and her family fled first to Finland and eventually to France. Her writing career was incredibly successful, with her first book, David Golder, made into a film, and nine further novels published by 1937. But when the Germans occupied France in 1940, she, her husband and her two small daughters, despite having converted to Catholicism, decided to flee Paris. Nevertheless, she was arrested on 13 July 1942 and interned in a concentration camp. She died in Auschwitz a month later.
Set in 1940, the year France fell to Nazi occupation, Suite Francaise tells two stories, that of a group of Parisians fleeing the invasion and that of a small rural community under German occupation. But even in dire circumstances, Némirovsky sheds light on the ways in which hope and love can be found in surprising places.