At the beginning, we find this:
Irene Nemirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903 into a welathy banking
family and emmigrated to France during the Russian Revolution.
After attending the Sorbonne, she began to write and swiftly
achieved success with an early novel, <i>David Golder</i>, which
was followed by <i>The Ball</i>, <i>Snow in Autumn</i>, <i>Dogs
and Wolves</i>, and <i>The Courilof Affair</i>, among others.
She died in 1942 at Auschwitz.
It's a wonderful set of vignettes about people whose circumstances are upset by the invasion of France by the Nazis in 1940. There's a bunch of correspondence at the end between her and her publisher, growing ever weary about the laws being passed against Jews and eventually a few messages from her distraught husband as he tries to find her after her arrest. Usually you don't find such a strong connection between the characters in a book and a personal (and tragic) story of the author. I've been reading a lot of early WWII stuff these days, and this fits in nicely. Apparently this book was "lost" for many years until someone translated it in 2006.
/jordan