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  • Published: 1 July 2010
  • ISBN: 9781407065366
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 272

All Our Worldly Goods




Reads like prequel to Suite Française, but is a perfect novel in its own right - a gripping story of family life, of money and love, set against the backdrop of France in two terrible world wars.

From the author of the bestselling Suite Française.

Pierre and Agnès 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. Even when war is imminent and Pierre is called up, the old man is unforgiving. Taut, evocative and beautifully paced, All Our Worldly Goods points up with heartbreaking detail and clarity how close were those two wars, how history repeated itself, tragically, shockingly...

'A remarkable novel...beautifully translated... Her voice, compassionate yet always shrewd, with its sharp portrait of France at war and during the optimistic and confused Twenties and early Thirties, is always distinctive' Literary Review

  • Published: 1 July 2010
  • ISBN: 9781407065366
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 272

About the author

Irène Némirovsky

Irène Némirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903, the daughter of a successful Jewish banker. In 1918 her family fled the Russian Revolution for France where she became a bestselling novelist, author of David Golder, All Our Worldly Goods, The Dogs and the Wolves and other works published in her lifetime or soon after, such as the posthumously published Suite Française and Fire in the Blood. She was prevented from publishing when the Germans occupied France and moved with her husband and two small daughters from Paris to the safety of the small village of Issy-l'Evêque (in German occupied territory). It was here that Irène began writing Suite Française. She died in Auschwitz in 1942.

Also by Irène Némirovsky

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Praise for All Our Worldly Goods

A coolly crafted traditional family novel

A S Byatt, Guardian

A gorgeous novel - witty, tender and true

Financial Times

A remarkable novel...beautifully translated... Her voice, compassionate yet always shrewd, with its sharp portrait of France at war and during the optimistic and confused Twenties and early Thirties, is always distinctive

Literary Review

Némirovsky's great bourgeois tragedy is modest in scale but epic in scope. Her highly distinctive style, the delicate but relentless accretion of finely observed detail, produces a story in which universal cataclysm mirrored in apparently insignificant personal destiny, to extraordinary resonant effect

Jane Shilling, Sunday Telegraph

Némirovsky's last stories are a living history of the occupation, written in real time

Sunday Times