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Knopf
October 2007
On Sale: September 25, 2007
160 pages
ISBN: 0307267482
EAN: 9780307267481
Hardcover
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Fiction
Here is a missing piece of the remarkable posthumous legacy of Irรจne Nรฉmirovsky, author of the internationally acclaimed Suite Franรงaise. Written in 1941, the manuscript of Fire in the Blood was entrusted in pieces to family and a friend when the author was sent to her death at Auschwitz. The novelโonly now assembled in its entiretyโteems with the intertwined lives of an insular French village in the years before the war, when โpeaceโ was less important as a political state than as a coveted personal condition: the untroubled pinnacle of happiness. At the center of the tale is Silvio: in his younger years he fled the boredom of the village and made a life of travel and adventure. Now heโs returned, living in a farmerโs hovel in the middle of the woods, and, much to his familyโs chagrin, perfectly content with his solitude. But when he attends the wedding of his favorite young cousinโโshe has the thing that, when I was young, I used to value most in women: she has fireโโSilvio begins to be drawn back into the complicated life of this small town. As his narration unfolds, we are given an intimate picture of the loves and infidelities, the scandals, the youthful ardor and regrets of age that tie Silvio to the long-guarded secrets of the past. Nรฉmirovsky wrote with a crystalline understanding of the pretensions and protections of society, and of the varied workings of the human heart, in language as evocative of a vanished era as of the emotional and moral ambiguities in her charactersโ lives. All of which was evident in Suite Franรงaiseโand abundantly evident again in this powerful, passionate novel.
 Media BuzzWeekend Edition Saturday - September 22, 2007
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