When Suite Française was first published in France 18 months ago it caused a stir. The book had an impossibly dramatic publishing history: its author had been deported from France in 1942 and had died in Auschwitz and the manuscript had been saved by a little girl who was running for her life. Then it was lost for 60 years. Irène Némirovsky did not live to complete or correct the work, but the fragment that has survived is a great novel that can be read on several levels, the most immediate being a vivid account of recently lived experience. It is in two sections, ‘Storm in June’ and ‘Dolce’, that stand separately but were intended to be the first parts of a five-volume sequence.
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