Four Novels [Hardcover]

In 2006 English readers worldwide were introduced to Irène Némirovsky's rediscovered masterpiece, Suite Française, which topped just about every "best of" list that year, including our own. Thanks to the editors of the Everyman's Library 20th-Century Classics series, a second wave of the prolific author's writing has just hit our shores. In a single volume, readers can find four of Nemirovsky's gem-like early novellas--David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn, and The Courilof Affair--with all the trimmings: a shrewd introduction by Claire Messud (The Emperor's Children) and a detailed chronology of the author's life and times. These first novellas demonstrate Némirovsky's genius for exposing an individual's virtues and flaws, much like a jeweler examining a diamond under a loupe. Potentially one-dimensional characters such as a greedy businessman or a spiteful teenager emerge from these stories as multi-faceted figures whose questionable beliefs and actions compel us to re-examine our own. Don't miss these short, but potent tales. --Lauren Nemroff --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Through the 1920s and '30s Russian-Jewish émigré Némirovsky, author of the recently rediscovered and internationally bestselling Suite Française, was a popular and critically acclaimed novelist in her adopted France. These four short early novels reveal her clear-eyed view into the deeply compromised human heart. David Golder, her third novel and the only one in the volume previously available in English, is saturated with the despairing mood of its title character, an embittered Jewish business- and family man in ill health, left after the suicide of his bankrupt partner to question the value of the great petroleum fortune he has amassed. The Courilof Affair is narrated by Léon M., a dying Russian revolutionary: he recounts his relationship with Valerian Courilof, the minister of education in imperial Russia. Léon grew to like the decrepit, politically ruined Courilof, even as he was ordered to kill him. The Ball is a psychologically acute account of the relationship between a narcissistic French mother—married to her former boss, a rich German Jew—and their enraged adolescent daughter, Antoinette; the similarly brief Snow in Autumn is a tender portrait of an old, devoted Russian nanny who cannot adjust to life as an émigré in Paris. These four early works by Némirovsky reveal her impressive range, bitingly exact settings and insight into profoundly flawed and compromised characters. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

"The work of a genuine artist" -- Julian Barnes "Nemirovsky has a great gift for describing the ordinariness that surrounds catastrophes... it is this ability to conjure up people, in all their moods and foibles, their selflessness or vanity, that makes Suite Francaise so remarkable" Literary Review

Irene Nemirovsky 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 . She was prevented from publishing when the Germans occupied France and moved with her husband and two small daughters from Paris to the safety of the small village of Issy-l'Eveque (in German occupied territory). It was here that Irene began writing Suite Francaise. She died in Auschwitz in 1942. INTRODUCER BIOGRAPHY: Novelist Claire Messud is the award-winning author of When the World Was Steady, The Hunters, The Last Life and, most recently, The Emperor's Children.