Fiction - N

In this section we'll keep you up to date with news of books you might be interested in. The information will come from the publishers' website and we will add our reviews as often as we can.

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Dimanche and Other Stories

Irene Nemirovsky

Translated from the French by Bridget Patterson.

Persephone Books ISBN 9781903155776

The ten pieces in Dimanche are everything that a short story should be: beautifully written, novels in miniature, fascinating, profound, all this and more. As in a Chekhov short story, little happens but everything happens. Whether describing the impatience of a girl waiting for her lover, the tortured relationships of a large family, or the emotions of someone fleeing the Nazis, Némirovsky is always an extremely astute observer, delicate, perceptive and ironic.    

The Dogs and the Wolves

Translated by Sandra Smith

Chatto & Windus  ISBN 9780701181307
October 2009

This wonderful, panoramic novel goes right back to Irène Némirovsky’s

roots, sweeping the reader from the Jewish quarter of a Ukrainian city in the early years of the twentieth century to Paris in the twenties and thirties, and back again to eastern Europe in a snowy winter on the eve of war.

At its heart is a tragic love, between Ada from the poor Jewish quarter and Harry, son of a rich financier. The dogs are the comfortable, assimilated rich Jews up on the hill, while the wolves, their distant cousins, struggle below in the ghetto. Ada grows up motherless, looked after first by her father, then by an indomitable, social-climbing aunt, and eventually moves to Paris with her aunt’s family, all of them looking for a brighter future. Ada makes a living in Paris as an artist, painting scenes from the world she has left behind. Her cousin Ben, intense and ferociously intelligent, has loved her for years; they share memories – together they survived the terrible pogroms of their childhood – and he presses her to marry him. But Harry Sinner is also in Paris, moving in exclusive circles, and infatuated with the daughter of a wealthy gentile banker. One day he buys two paintings which remind him of his past… and the course of Ada’s life changes once more.

The Dogs and the Wolves, painted on a broad, vibrant canvas, with Némirovsky’s acute eye for small cruelties and everyday sacrifice, is an achingly poignant novel about blood and belonging, dreams and desire.

All Our Wordly Goods

Vintage ISBN 9780099520443

July 2009

In haunting ways this wonderful, compelling novel prefigures Suite Francaise and some of the themes of Nemirovsky's great unfinished sequence of novels. All Our Worldly Goods, though, is complete, and exquisitely so - a perfect novel in its own right. First published in France in 1947, after the author's death, it is a gripping story of family life and starcrossed lovers, of money and greed, set against the backdrop of France from 1911 to 1940 between two terrible wars. Pierre and Agnes marry for love against the wishes of his parents and the family patriarch, the tyrannical industrialist Julien Hardelot, provoking a family feud which cascades down the generations.This is "Balzac" or The Forsyte Saga on a smaller, more intimate scale, the bourgeoisie observed close-up with Nemirovsky's characteristically sly humour and clear-eyed compassion. Full of drama and heartbreak, telling observation of the devastating effects of two wars on a small town and an industrial family, this is Nemirovsky at the height of her powers. The exodus and flow of refugee humanity through the town in both wars foreshadows Suite Francaise, but differently, because this is Northern France, near the Somme, and the town itself is twice razed. Taut, evocative and beautifully paced, the novel points up with heartbreaking detail and clarity how close were those two wars, how history repeated itself, tragically, shockingly...It opens in the Edwardian era, on a fashionable Normandy beach, and ends with a changed world, under Nazi occupation.

Le Bal

Vintage ISBN 9780099493976  
October 2007

Le Bal depicts the life of the Kampfs who, having recently gone up in the world thanks to luck with the stock decide to throw a ball in order to launch themselves into society. Their daughter Antoinette, who has just turned fourteen, dreams of attending. But Madame Kampf is resolved not to present her daughter, already so grown up, to her admirers. Instead, Antoinette is forced to sleep in the laundry room, as her bedroom is used as coatroom. In an unpremeditated fury of revolt and despair, Antoinette takes her revenge. It is swift and it is horrible. A cruel, funny and tender examination of class differences, of the dynamic between mother and daughter, Le Bal is ultimately dedicated to the torments of childhood. Snow in Autumn pays homage to Nemirovsky's beloved Chekhov and chronicles the life of a devoted servant following her masters as they flee Revolutionary Moscow and emigrate to a life of hardship in Paris.

David Golder

Translated by Sandra Smith

Vintage ISBN 9780099493969  

In 1929, 26-year-old Irène Némirovsky shot to fame in France with the publication of her second novel David Golder. At the time, only the most prescient would have predicted the events that led to her extraordinary final novel Suite Française and her death at Auschwitz. Yet the clues are there in this astonishingly mature story of an elderly Jewish businessman who has sold his soul.

Golder is a superb creation. Born into poverty on the Black Sea, he has clawed his way to fabulous wealth by speculating on gold and oil. When the novel opens, he is at work in his magnificent Parisian apartment while his wife and beloved daughter, Joy, spend his money at their villa in Biarritz. But Golder’s security is fragile. For years he has defended his business interests from cut-throat competitors. Now his health is beginning to show the strain. As his body betrays him, so too do his wife and child, leaving him to decide which to pursue: revenge or altruism?

Available for the first time since 1930, David Golder is a page-turningly chilling and brilliant portrait of the frenzied capitalism of the 1920s and a universal parable about the mirage of wealth.

Suite Francaise

Vintage ISBN 9780099519072  
February 07

In 1941, Irène Némirovsky sat down to write a book that would convey the magnitude of what she was living through, not in terms of battles and politicians, but by evoking the domestic lives and personal trials of the ordinary citizens of France. She did not live to see her ambition fulfilled, or to know that sixty-five years later, Suite Française would be published for the first time, and hailed as a masterpiece

Set during a year that begins with France's fall to the Nazis in June 1940 and ends with Germany turning its attention to Russia, Suite Française falls into two parts. The first is a brilliant depiction of a group of Parisians as they flee the Nazi invasion and make their way through the chaos of France; the second follows the inhabitants of a small rural community under occupation who find themselves thrown together in ways they never expected. Némirovsky's brilliance as a writer lay in her portrayal of people, and this is a novel that teems with wonderful characters, each more vivid than the next. Haughty aristocrats, bourgeois bankers and snobbish aesthetes rub shoulders with uncouth workers and bolshy farmers. Women variously resist or succumb to the charms of German soldiers. However, amidst the mess of defeat, and all the hypocrisy and compromise, there is hope. True nobility and love exist, but often in surprising places.

Irene Némirovsky conceived of Suite Française as a four- or five-part novel. It was to be a symphony - her War and Peace. Although only two sections were finished before her tragic death, they form a book that is beautifully complete in itself, and awe-inspiring in its understanding of humanity.

Read Stuart Jeffries' article in the Guardian on Nemirovsky's supposed antisemitism.

Born in Kiev in 1903, Irène Némirovsky fled the Russian Revolution for France where she became an acclaimed novelist. She wrote over 10 novels, including an unfinished magnum opus Suite Française which was published posthumously in France in 2004 and has become an international bestseller. She died in Auschwitz in 1942.

World Cup Wishes

Eshkol Nevo

Translated from Hebrew by Sondra Silverston

Chatto & Windus ISBN 9780701184421

May 2010

Four friends get together to watch the 1998 World Cup final. One of them has an idea: let's write down our wishes for the next few years, put them away, and during the next final - four years from now - we'll get them out and see how many we've achieved. This is how World Cup Wishes opens, and from here we watch what happens to their wishes and their friendships as life marches on.

The four men's bond is deep and solid, but tested by betrayal, death,and distance their alliance comes under pressure. Each friend offers a different perspective, though not necessarily a reliable one... and as they and the world around them change, so do their ideas of friendship and happiness. By the end they are forced to ask whether wishes can really be fulfilled. Or will their story turn out to be a requiem - for a generation, for friendship, or even for one of the four young men?

Once again, Eshkol Nevo has produced a novel suffused with charm, warmth and an astonishing wisdom.

Homesick

Vintage ISBN 9780099507673  

February 2008

It is 1995 and Noa and Amir have decided to move in together. Noa is studying photography in Jerusalem and Amir is a psychology student in Tel Aviv, so they choose a tiny flat in a village in the hills, between the two cities. Originally called El-Kastel, the village was emptied of its Arab inhabitants in 1948 and is now the home of Jewish immigrants from Kurdistan. Noa and Amir’s flat is separated from that of their landlords, Sima and Moshe Zakian, by a thin wall, but on each side we find a completely different world. Next door lives a family grieving for their eldest son, killed in Lebanon. His younger brother, Yotam, forgotten by his parents, turns to Amir for friendship. And further down the street, as he works at the building site, Saddiq watches the house...

In this enchanting and irresistible novel, the narrative moves from character to character offering us glimpses into their lives. Each of them comes from somewhere different but there’s much about them that’s the same. Homesick is a beautiful, clever and moving story about history, love, family and the true meaning of home.