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How this novel landed in bookstores sixty-four years after it was written is a story in itself. Left incomplete when Némirovsky, a Russian Jew living in France in the 1940s, was arrested by Nazis and sent to die at Auschwitz, the manuscript of Suite Française remained unknown and unpublished for decades among the author’s handwritten notes. Set during the opening weeks of the German invasion of France, the novel follows ordinary citizens as their lives are turned upside down by the inexorable approach of war. A pampered intellectual faces hardship for the first time in his life when he joins the hordes of refugees fleeing Paris for the countryside. A poor couple waits anxiously for news of their son, a soldier in the French army. A wealthy woman struggles to protect her children from the realities of living under occupation. Neither heroes nor villains, Némirovksy’s characters constitute a remarkably honest portrayal of regular people in extraordinary circumstances, made all the more poignant by the author’s own tragic fate.