> Skip to content
  • Published: 1 July 2010
  • ISBN: 9781407092072
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 176

Fire in the Blood




A real literary find - an unpublished jewel from the author of the internationally bestselling Suite Française.

From the author of the bestselling Suite Française.

Set in the rural French town in Burgundy that would also form the backdrop to the bestselling Suite Française, Fire in the Blood is the story of Silvio, his cousin's wife Hélène, her second husband Françoise, and of the truths, deaths, marriages, children, houses and mills that bind them with love and hatred, deception and betrayal.

  • Published: 1 July 2010
  • ISBN: 9781407092072
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 176

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

See all

Praise for Fire in the Blood

A gem-like novella, polished, multi-faceted and brilliant; a sweet pastoral that turns bracingly bitter; beautifully poised between innocence and experience, desire and death. I look forward to reading it again

Daily Telegraph

A literary find of the same quality as Suite Française...it has a universal resonance by exhibiting not only what people do to each other but what the passing of time does to us all

Peter Kemp, Sunday Times

Another masterpiece

Sunday Times

Gripping and full of interest...it confirms Némirovsky's brilliance as a storyteller with a deep understanding of the hidden flaws and cruelties in the human heart

Sunday Telegraph

Like Chekhov, she observes and powerfully expresses the detail that fixes the scene

Guardian

Magnificently atmospheric... She is so clever, quick and observant, that every character in the story bounds into life

Carmen Callil, Financial Times

Mesmerising...another gem from a glittering career cut tragically short

Daily Express

Némirovsky's voice is not loud, flamboyant or morose. It is clear and steady. It is the steadiness, the slow burn that does the work

Guardian

The novella is a model of storytelling... What a hellish Arcadia Némirovsky conjures up, and with what refinement and subtlety

Independent

This slender volume packs in some hefty emotions...jealousy, bitterness, greed and of course, passion

Marie Claire