Book description
Set in the rural French town in Burgundy that would also form the
backdrop to the bestselling
Suite Française, Fire in the Blood
is the story of Silvio, his cousin's wife Hélène, her second husband Franç
oise, and of the truths, deaths, marriages, children, houses and mills
that bind them with love and hatred, deception and betrayal. Irène
Némirovksy 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 Française
. 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'Evèque (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 Française
, was in March 2007.
