By the early 1940s, when Ukrainian-born Irène Némirovsky began working on what would become SUITE FRANÇAISE --- the first two parts of a planned five-part novel --- she was already a highly successful writer living in Paris. But she was also a Jew, and in 1942 she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz: A month later she was dead at the age of 39. Two years earlier, living in a small village in central France --- where she, her husband and their two small daughters had fled in a vain attempt to elude the Nazis--- she’d begun her novel, a luminous portrayal of a human drama in which she herself would become a victim. When she was arrested, she had completed two parts of the epic, the handwritten manuscripts of which were hidden in a suitcase that her daughters would take with them into hiding and eventually into freedom. Sixty-four years later, at long last, we can read Némirovsky’s literary masterpiece.

SUITE FRANÇAISE is a singularly piercing evocation --- at once subtle and severe, deeply compassionate and fiercely ironic --- of life and death in occupied France, and a brilliant, profoundly moving work of art.