French Suite

In the hot summer of 1940, German troops invaded France. On the roads of war, under bombs, rolls an avalanche of desperate, deathly terrified people: abandoned by their lovers, courtesans, pampered bourgeois, the poor, the disabled, the elderly, and children.... In the crowd of refugees, everything merged - compassion and vileness, courage and fear, selflessness and cruelty. Like all of France, the town of Bussy finds it hard to come to terms with the fact that it has become a refuge for the occupiers...
 
The novel by the famous French writer Irène Némirovsky (1903-1942), who perished in Auschwitz, ruthlessly exposes the psychology of people during an enemy invasion, reviving a tragic page of French history.
 
Irène Némirovsky was born in Kyiv in 1903 and emigrated to France with her family when she was 15 years old. Literary success came to Irène in the late 1920s. Fleeing from the German invasion, she escaped from Paris and settled in a remote village, but was arrested and died in Auschwitz in 1942.
Her daughter Denise Epstein preserved the manuscript of her mother's last work, the novel "French Suite", in which the tragic flight of the French in June 1940 is described with astonishing power. The novel was published in 2004 and achieved astounding success. It was awarded the Renaudot literary prize, which was a unique event, as this prize, like the Nobel Prize, is only given to living authors.