Dinner & A Book - Fire in the Blood

 Join me and my guest, Gabrielle Robinson as we discuss Irene Nemirovsky's book "Fire in the Blood" on Dinner and a Book.

Némirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903, and her first language was French. Because of her Jewish banker father's privileged relationship with imperial Russia, the Némirovskys had to flee after the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. By 1919, they made their way to Paris, where her father promptly rebuilt his fortune, and Némirovsky made a name for herself as a Balzacian novelist.

Fire in the Blood is a missing piece of the remarkable posthumous legacy of Irène Némirovsky, author of the internationally acclaimed Suite Française.

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 novel—only now assembled in its entirety—teems with the intertwined lives of an insular French village in the years before the war, when "peace" was less important as a political state than as a coveted personal condition: the untroubled pinnacle of happiness.