num_pages: 573
description: Celebrated in pre-WWII France for her bestselling fiction, the Jewish Russian-born Némirovsky was shipped to Auschwitz in the summer of 1942, months after this long-lost masterwork was composed. Némirovsky, a convert to Catholicism, began a planned five-novel cycle as Nazi forces overran northern France in 1940. This gripping "suite," collecting the first two unpolished but wondrously literary sections of a work cut short, have surfaced more than six decades after her death. The first, "Storm in June," chronicles the connecting lives of a disparate clutch of Parisians, among them a snobbish author, a venal banker, a noble priest shepherding churlish orphans, a foppish aesthete and a loving lower-class couple, all fleeing city comforts for the chaotic countryside, mere hours ahead of the advancing Germans. The second, "Dolce," set in 1941 in a farming village under German occupation, tells how peasant farmers, their pretty daughters and petit bourgeois collaborationists coexisted with their Nazi rulers. In a workbook entry penned just weeks before her arrest, Némirovsky noted that her goal was to describe "daily life, the emotional life and especially the comedy it provides." This heroic work does just that, by focusing with compassion and clarity on individual human dramas
language: French
title: Suite Française
titlecomplete: Suite Française
characters: Maurice Michaud, Philippe Péricand, Jean-Marie Michaud, Gabriel Corte, Charlotte Péricand, Hubert Péricand, Madeleine Sabarie, Charles Langelet, Jeanne Michaud
genres: Classics, France, Historical, World War II, Holocaust, War, Novels, Historical Fiction, Fiction, Book Club
ratings_count: 73106
awards: awardedAt: 1325404800000
name: Magnesia Litera
category: Translation (Litera za překladovou knihu), awardedAt: 1072944000000
name: Prix Renaudot, awardedAt: 1167638400000
name: PEN Translation Prize
category: Sandra Smith, awardedAt: 1136102400000
name: French-American Foundation Translation Prize
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 1167638400000
name: Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize
publisher: French & European Pubns