An unfinished work has the potential still to be perfect. When the novelist Irène Némirovsky was captured by German forces in 1942, she left behind work in progress for a series of novellas about life in occupied France. (Despite her conversion to Catholicism three years earlier, Némirovsky was classified as of Jewish descent.) Half a century after her death in Auschwitz, the manuscript was discovered by one of her daughters in a notebook and, duly edited and annotated, Suite Française became an international bestseller. The work’s interruption is inevitably part of its elegiac appeal, blending as it does with the fiction’s themes of disruption, separation and conflict. This is a narrative of invasion, occupation, betrayal and the beginnings of love