Irène Némirovsky
Irène Némirovsky
Irène Némirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903, the daughter of a wealthy Russian Jewish banker. In 1918 the family fled from Petrograd to Paris. Irène attended the Sorbonne, led a hectic social life, and married Michel Epstein in 1926. She had the first of her two daughters in 1929, the year she published the hugely successful David Golder. Over the next ten years she wrote nine more novels and forty short stories. When WW2 broke out the children were sent to live in Burgundy; their parents joined them in June 1940. In 1941 Némirovsky started work on her masterpiece Suite Française. She was deported to her death in July 1942. The unfinished manuscript of Suite Française survived unread in a suitcase; it was published in 2004 and became an international bestseller. Dimanche and Other Stories is the first collection of Némirovsky’s stories to appear in English.