THERE IS, FIRST, THE STORY BE-HIND this moving and remarkably pol-ished novel that is technically a work in progress. In June 1940, after the Germans oc-cupied Paris, Irene Nemirovsky, already ex-tensively published, moved to the country-side with two small daughters and her husband. It was the second time that she had been forced into flight. Earlier, along with her banker father and obsessively fastidious mother, she had fled St Petersburg for France, upon the Bolshevik conquest.

It was a tenuous existence. Being Jewish, her husband, Michel Epstein, was barred from working in his bank. She could no longer be published. Her elder daughter, Denise, had the Jewish star firmly affixed on her coat. In what must have been intensely anxious times, Nemirovsky planned her most ambitious fiction so far. Working notes in-cluded in this edition detail a clear plan for a five-part novel. She got through two— ‘Storm in June’ and ‘Dolce’—before being arrested by the French police on July 13, 1942. She died at Auschwitz on August 17. Epstein would be deported later that year.

Denise and her sister, Elizabeth, thereaft-er, were hidden in different places by their teachers. In their own flight, they gathered a few things to cart along, among them their mother’s notebook. The notebook—the man-uscript of Suite Francaise—was kept with great care, but they could not quite summon the strength to read through it. Years later, Eliza-beth would write a biography of her mother.

She would herself be dead by the time Denise typed out the manuscript, much of it having to be read with a magnifying glass as Ne-mirovsky’s script kept getting smaller and smaller to conserve paper.

... contd.