Page Three

Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky

I think this book will be quite a shift from the previous one. I chose this book because of how much I've heard about in the past year. If you look at any book list, or any bestseller list, from the Globe and Mail to the New York Times, you will see Suite Francaise listed near the top. Something drew me to this book, so I hope it delivers.

The book was originally intended to have five volumes, but was published with two; Nemirovsky, from what I gather, was arrested and died in Auschwitz before she could complete the final three. The first volume bounces back and forth between various families and social classes, as it describes the evacuation from Paris in 1940. The second volume describes a German-occupied village and a love affair between a German soldier and a French woman.

"If you read only one piece of fiction this year, read Irène Némirovsky’s miraculous last novel. Suite Française is miraculous for the power, brilliance and beauty of the writing, and for the very wholeness of the work, despite its being less than half the 1,000 pages its author intended. . . . Némirovsky’s novel speaks as resonantly today as it would have had it been published in the year of her death: It is a stunning denunciation of the hypocrisy and greed of the ruling elites who make, but never seem to suffer from, war."—The Globe and Mail