Readers everywhere were introduced to the work of Irène Némirovsky through the publication of her long-lost masterpiece, Suite Française. But Suite Française was only a coda to the brief yet prolific career of this remarkable novelist, for years nearly forgotten.
Here in one volume are four of Némirovsky’s other novels – all of them newly translated by the award-winning Sandra Smith, and all, except David Golder, available in English for the first time. David Golder is the book that established Némirovsky’s reputation in France in 1929 when she was twenty-six. It is a novel about greed and loneliness, the story of an ageing Russian Jewish businessman, an exile in France, learning to confront death and the knowledge that wealth has not brought him happiness. The Ball is both a sensitive exploration of adolescence and a merciless exposure of bourgeois social pretension. Snow in Autumn is an evocative tale of White Russian émigrés in Paris, while in The Courilof Affair a retired Russian revolutionary recalls an infamous assassination committed in his youth. Introduced by novelist Claire Messud, this collection offers the same mastery of narrative, clarity of language and empathetic grasp of human behaviour that would give shape to Suite Française.