In certain uncanny ways this wonderful, compelling novel prefigures "Suite Francaise" and rehearses some of the themes of her big unfinished sequence of novels. Nemirovsky must have down put her pen in 1940 and picked it straight up again to embark on "Suite Francaise"...This novel, though is finished, and exquisitely so - first published in France in 1947. It tells the story of two intertwined but warring French families through two world wars from 1911 to 1940, and its themes are war, love and money. This is "Balzac" or "The Forsyte Saga" on a smaller, more intimate scale, with the bourgeoisie observed close-up, with Nemirovsky's characteristically clear-eyed compassion and sly humour. Full of moving, vivid observation of the devastating effects of the two wars on a small Normandy town and an industrial family, whose patriarch is a monstrous David Golder character (as French as they come and not in the least Jewish).The exodus and flow of refugee humanity through the town in both wars pre-figures "Suite Francaise", but differently again, because this is Normandy and near the Somme, and the town itself is twice razed.

Evocative and unputdownable the novel brings home with heartbreaking detail and clarity how close were those two wars, how history repeated itself, unbelievably...It opens in the Edwardian era (on a fashionable Normandy beach) and ends with a changed world, under Nazi occupation. Nemirovsky has an astonishing ability to give you the most blinkered, small-minded of characters (in this case Mme Hardelot, mother of one of the central characters) and bring tears to your eyes - when Mme H realises that her son is leaving for the front in minutes rather than days...It's a gripping story of family life and starcrossed love, of money and feuds, against the backdrop of two terrible wars.