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..

A real literary find - an unpublished jewel from the author of the internationally bestselling Suite Francaise

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.

Reviews
"All Nemirovsky's talent is apparent in her first novel: her pitiless gaze and her generous heart ... Suite Francaise may take the crown, but her other works confirm that she was not simply the chronicler of June 1940, but a writer with a very broad canvas who has finally found her place in the history of literature." Lire "A beautiful writer - lucid, bright ... She misses nothing." The Times "Like Chekhov, she observes and powerfully expresses the detail that fixes the scene." Guardian "A novelist of the very first order, perceptive to a fault and sly in her emotional restraint." Evening Standard



Book Information
ISBN 9780701181833
Author Irene Nemirovsky
Format Hardback
Page Count 176
Imprint Chatto & Windus
Publisher Vintage Publishing
Weight(grams) 270g
Dimensions(mm) 207mm * 137mm * 19mm