Fire in the Blood - Softcover

Irene Nemirovsky

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099516098 ISBN 13: 9780099516095

Publisher: Vintage Books USA, 2008

Synopsis

This perfect gem of a novel by the author of the posthumously acclaimed and bestselling "Suite Francaise" has never previously been published and was discovered only recently in separate archive files. A couple of pages were in the famous suitcase which her daughters saved, and the balance had been deposited with a family friend and editor during the war. A morality tale with doubtful morals, a story of murder, love and betrayal in rural France, "Fire in the Blood", planned in 1937, written in 1941, is set in a small village, based on Issy-l'Eveque where "Suite Francaise" was written, and brilliantly prefigures the village community in her later masterpiece. An old man looks back on a chequered life with secret regrets, concealing a truth he will not reveal until the end."Fire in the Blood" is a small and beautiful chamber piece which starts quietly, lyrically, but then races away with revelations and narrative twists in a story about young women forced into marriages with old men, about mothers and daughters, stepmothers and stepdaughters, youthful passions and the regrets of old age, about peasant communities and the way they hide their secrets. Nemirovsky looks at her characters, both young and old, with the same clear-eyed distance and humanity as she displayed in Suite Francaise, unpeeling layer after layer. Atmospheric and haunting as Embers and with the crystalline perfection of Chekhov, "Fire in the Blood" is a gripping literary find.

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Review

Amazon Best of the Month, October 2007: As the Nazis advanced on France, celebrated writer Irčne Némirovsky composed two final masterworks: Suite Française and Fire in the Blood. The first, smuggled out in a suitcase by her escaping daughters when Némirovsky was taken to her death at Auschwitz in 1942, surfaced more than 60 years later and restored her bestselling status. The other, two pages of which slipped out in that same suitcase, was thought lost--until biographers discovered the rest of the manuscript in papers given to Némirovsky's editor for safekeeping. A worthy companion to Suite Française, it follows three interwoven stories across two decades, when the hot-blooded affairs of youth threaten the cool calm of middle age. Once it has all unraveled, the last line lodges in your heart like a sliver. If only there could have been more. --Mari Malcolm

About the Author

Irene Nemirovksy was born in Kiev in 1903, the daughter of a successful Jewish banker. In 1918 her family fled the Russian Revolution for France where she became a bestselling novelist, author of David Golder, Le Bal and other works published in her lifetime, as well as the posthumous Suite Francaise. Prevented from publishing when the Germans occupied France in 1940, she stayed with her husband and two small daughters in the small village of Issy-l'Eveque (in German occupied territory) where she had moved from Paris just before the invasion. In July 1942 she was arrested by the French police and interned in Pithiviers concentration camp, and from there immediately deported to Auschwitz where she died in August 1942. The first French publication of Fire in the Blood, by the publishers who discovered and published Suite Francaise, was in March 2007.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage Books USA
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0099516098
• ISBN 13: 9780099516095
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 153