FIRE IN THE BLOOD

This perfect gem of a novel by the author of the posthumously acclaimed andbestselling Suite Française has never previously been published and wasdiscovered only recently in separate archive files. A few pages were inthe famous suitcase which her daughters saved, and the balance had beendeposited with a very close friend during the war. A morality tale withdoubtful 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 smallvillage, based on Issy-l'Evčque where Suite Française was written, andbrilliantly prefigures the village community in her later masterpiece. An old man looks back on a chequered life with secret regrets, concealinga truth he will not reveal until the end. Fire in the Blood is a small andbeautiful chamber piece which starts quietly, lyrically, but then racesaway with revelations and narrative twists in a story about young womenforced into marriages with old men, about mothers and daughters,stepmothers and stepdaughters, youthful passions and the regrets of oldage, about peasant communities and the way they hide their secrets.Némirovsky looks at her characters, both young and old, with the sameclear-eyed distance and humanity as she displayed in Suite Française,unpeeling layer after layer. Atmospheric and haunting as Embers and withthe crystalline perfection of Chekhov, Fire in the Blood is a grippingliterary find..