Suite française

Written in the midst of History itself, Suite française captures almost in real time the Exodus of June 1940, which in tragic disorder swept up French families of every kind, from the most privileged to the most modest. With remarkable skill, Irène Némirovsky tracks the countless small cowardices and the fragile flickers of solidarity within a population in retreat. Mistresses abandoned by their lovers, wealthy bourgeois disgusted by the common crowd, wounded soldiers left behind in farmhouses: all clog the roads of France, bombed at random...Little by little, the enemy takes possession of a country that is inert and frightened. Like so many others, the village of Bussy is then forced to house German troops. Heightened by the presence of the occupier, the social tensions and resentments of the villagers begin to stir...A deeply moving, intimate and relentless novel, revealing with extraordinary clarity the soul of every Frenchman during the Occupation. Enriched with notes and with Irène Némirovsky's correspondence, Suite française brings back, in a brilliant and perceptive pen, a raw nerve of our collective memory.