FRENCH CLASSICS FEATURED

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The Dogs and the Wolves, Jezebel, The Misunderstanding and Dolce from the Suite Française Series

Irène Némirovsky: Four BBC Radio Full-Cast Dramatisations

BBC radio adaptations of four acclaimed works from the bestselling Ukrainian-born author Irène Némirovsky 
 
Best known for her posthumously published novel Suite Française, Irène Némirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903. Her family fled the Russian Revolution for Paris, where she found fame as a novelist. But when the Nazis occupied France, she was arrested as a Jew and sent to Auschwitz, where she died aged just 39. This collection includes four of her best works, dramatised for radio with a full cast. 
 
The Misunderstanding - Scarred by war, Yves returns to the Spanish resort of his childhood. There he meets beautiful, bored Denise, and the duo embark on an affair. But their love is challenged by mutual misunderstanding. Described as Némirovsky's Madame Bovary, this compelling tale of passion and regret stars Sarah Smart and Joseph Kloska. 
 
Jezebel - 1935, and Gladys Eysenach, a beautiful, elegant woman obsessed with her lost youth, is on trial for shooting dead her much younger lover. Delving into her past, she recounts the key events that led to the murder. Frances Barber stars as Gladys, with Anna Francolini as Némirovsky. 
 
Dolce - In 1941, a German regiment is billeted in a French village. In the Angellier household two warring women pack away their valuables and prepare to meet the enemy. An adaptation of the second, standalone volume of Némirovsky's masterpiece, Suite Française, this searing depiction of France under German occupation stars Sian Thomas, Eve Best, Deborah Findlay and James D'Arcy. 
 
The Dogs and the Wolves - Growing up during the Jewish pogroms in Ukraine, Ada falls in love with her rich cousin, Harry Sinner. But her poor cousin, Ben, is in love with her. When both families move to Paris, Ada becomes an artist, while Harry moves in elite French society. Then one day, he sees two of Ada's paintings, and her life is changed forever... Sarah Smart stars as Ada, with Carl Prekopp as Harry and Graeme Hawley as Ben, in Némirovsky's epic tale of family, finance and fate. 
 
First published 1926 (The Misunderstanding), 1937 (Jezebel), 2006 (Dolce), 2009 (The Dogs and the Wolves) 
 
Cast and credits 
Written by Irène Némirovsky 
Translated by Sandra Smith 
 
The Misunderstanding 
Cast: Joseph Kloska, Sarah Smart, Charlotte Sienna Lee, Jake Ferretti, Evan Jones, Rupert Hill, Emma Gregory 
Dramatised by Lin Coghlan 
Directed by Pauline Harris 
First broadcast BBC Radio 4, 21-25 January 2019 
 
Jezebel 
Cast: Frances Barber, Anna Francolini, Natasha Cowley, David Sterne, Keziah Joseph, Victoria Brazier, Conrad Nelson, Ellen Dryden, John Catterall, Ashley Margolis 
Dramatised by Ellen Dryden 
Produced and directed by Pauline Harris 
First broadcast BBC Radio 4, 7-11 November 2016 
 
Dolce 
Cast: Sian Thomas, Eve Best, Deborah Findlay, James D'Arcy, Alex Tregear, Stuart McLoughlln, Teresa Gallagher 
Adapted by Penny Leicester 
Produced and directed by Di Speirs 
First broadcast BBC Radio 4, 14-18 August 2006 
 
The Dogs and the Wolves 
Cast: Anna Francolini, Sarah Smart, Carl Prekopp, Graeme Hawley, Sydney Wade, Ellis Hollins, Ben Hanley, Will Tacey, Olwen May, Fiona Clarke, Natalie Grady, Will Tacey 
Dramatised by Ellen Dryden 
Produced and directed by Pauline Harris 
First broadcast BBC Radio 4, 10-14 June 2013 
 
© 2023 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd. © 2023 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd

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.

The Fires of Autumn

The prequel to the internationally bestselling novel Suite Française: a coruscating, powerful story about one man's rise and fall and the brutal impact of war

Admirers of Nemirovsky’s Suite Française…won’t want to miss this novel

One puts it down with unqualified admiration… This fine novel will further enhance Irene Nemirovsky’s name

This astute novel is witness to an undeniable literary talent tragically cut short

Her writing is harder and more vicious… Nemirovsky is fascinated by the impact of war on human behaviour

Like Suite Française, this is a gripping novel that at the same time is a terrible indictment

It’s a sobering glimpse of the lives and loves of ordinary Parisians, and the best and worst of human nature

It is a triumphant tour de force, a powerful, cinematic, real-time account of a European nation in full, panicked flight from a merciless invader

A convincing portrait of human nature in the crucible of war

This sweeping novel cements Nemirovsky’s place as a master storyteller

Irène Némirovsky (Author) 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. Sandra Smith (Translator) Sandra Smith is the translator of all 14 novels by Irène Némirovsky available in English, a new translation of Camus's The Outsider; and The Necklace and Other Stories: Maupassant for Modern Times, Inseparable by Simone de Beauvoir (Ecco Press, USA), among many others. Her translation of Nemirovsky's Suite Française won the French-American Florence Gould Foundation Translation Prize for Fiction, as well as the PEN Translation Prize. Her translation of But You Did Not Come Back by Marceline Loridan-Ivens won The National Jewish Book Award. She currently teaches at NYU.

The prequel to the bestselling Suite Française 
 
Paris 1918, Bernard Jacquelain returns from the trenches a changed man. 
 
The city is a whirl of decadence and corruption and he embarks on a life of parties and shady business dealings, as well as an illicit affair. 
 
But as another war threatens, everything around him starts to crumble, and the future for him and for France suddenly looks dangerously uncertain.

The Misunderstanding

An intense story of self-destructive love: Irène Némirovsky's first novel, written when she was just twenty-one

How easy it is to be drawn into this superb period novel

Shows remarkable understanding of the mysteries of the human heart and the social, familial and economic pressures that pull two lovers apart, even as passion draws them closer

This is an astonishingly mature work of art. This study in the fleeting nature of happiness is immaculately translated by Sandra Smith

A misunderstanding [between lovers] soon turns passion and longing into burdensome demands requiring desperate measures

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, Le Bal, The Courilof Affair, All Our Worldly Goods and other works published in her lifetime or afterwards, such as Suite Française and Fire in the Blood. The Misunderstanding (Le Malentendu) was first published in France in Les OEuvres libres in 1926. Némirovsky 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). She died in Auschwitz in 1942.

From the author of the bestselling Suite Française. 
 
A compelling story of infatuation, passion and self-destructive love 
 
Yves Harteloup is a disappointed young man, scarred by the war. He returns for the summer to the rich, comfortable Atlantic resort of Hendaye, where he spent blissful childhood holidays. There he becomes infatuated by a beautiful, bored young woman, Denise, whose rich husband is often away on business. Intoxicated by summer nights and Yves’ intensity, Denise falls passionately in love, before the idyll has to end and Yves must return to his mundane office job. In the mournful Paris autumn their love founders on mutual misunderstanding and Denise is driven mad with desire and jealous suspicion until, acting on her sophisticated mother’s advice, she takes action...which she may regret forever.

The Wine of Solitude

From the author of Suite Française comes a powerful novel of family, war and the end of innocence

A wonderfully atmospheric novel...captivating and searingly honest... A brilliant coming of age novel

Haunting...profound...exquisitely wrought

The tangle of this unhappy family is beautifully and ruthlessly analysed... The relationship between mother and daughter is described with uncompromising lucidity... Némirovsky evokes the places of her childhood with a sensuous clarity

The Wine of Solitude is an end-of-innocence story... It is Némirovsky's powers of social observation...the implacable eye for the nuances of human conduct, that make The Wine of Solitude so memorable

Beautifully written... Her ability to evoke the feeling of time and especially place is remarkable

One of the best of her early novels... it is written with luminous intensity

This is Nemrovsky's most autobiographical novel...recalled in hauntingly atmospheric detail

It's an unerring portrait of a neglected, baleful and punitive daughter

Nemirovksy captures the rootless existence of emigres beautifully

Sandra Smith's translation is mellifluous and certain passages - the opening lines describing dusk in Kiev, for example - are breathtaking

Némirovsky excels at describing this dysfunctional household

Sandra Smith’s translation of the novel faithfully reflects Nemirovsky’s talents as an astute portraitist and storyteller

Nemirovsky evokes a time and a place when domestic upheaval could prove every bit as tragic and bloody as those played out on a wider stage

Irène Némirovksy 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, Le Bal, The Courilof Affair, All Our Worldly Goods and other works published in her lifetime or soon after, as well as the posthumously published Suite Française and Fire in the Blood. The Wine of Solitude (Le Vin de Solitude) was first published in France in 1935. Némirovksy died in Auschwitz in 1942. 
 
Sandra Smith is a fellow of Robinson College, Cambridge, and has translated all the novels of Irène Némirovksy available in English. 
 
'Sandra Smith's translations are of the highest quality.' J.M. Coetzee, New York Review of Books

From the author of the bestselling Suite Française. 
 
Hélène is a troubled young girl. Neglected by her self-absorbed mother and her adored but distant father, she longs for love and for freedom. As first the Great War and then the Russian Revolution rage in the background, she grows from a lonely, melancholy child to an angry young woman intent on destruction. 
 
The Wine of Solitude is a powerful tale of an unhappy family in difficult times and a woman prepared to wreak a shattering revenge.

The Dogs and the Wolves

A wonderful, panoramic novel and an achingly poignant love story from the bestselling author of Suite Française.

Written with tremendous assurance and finesse, The Dogs and the Wolves is an outstanding achievement of European fiction

The pleasure of this fine novel lies in its depiction of a doomed love affair... Némirovsky's exquisite descriptions of character reveal a brilliantly sharp eye

Nemirovsky was incapable of producing anything less than an enchanting novel. She has an irresistible talent for creating character and incident which makes this story as much a page-turner as anything she has written

Nemirovksy is a deeply engaged observer of her characters, and her depiction of the inner lives of both Jews and Gentiles in Sandra Smith's admirable translation of this exquisitely detailed novel, has the fine, authentic ring of artistic truth

She elegantly uses traditional orchestration, which makes her works, for all their weighty concerns, universally accessible and stirringly romantic

Irène Némirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903, the daughter of a Jewish banker. In 1918 her family fled the Russian Revolution for France where she became a bestselling novelist, author of David Golder, Le Bal, The Courilof Affair, All Our Worldly Goods and other works published in her lifetime or soon after, as well as of the recent posthumously published Suite Française and Fire in the Blood. The Dogs and the Wolves, now appearing for the first time in English, was published in France in spring 1940, just months before France fell to the Nazis. Némirovsky died in Auschwitz in 1942.

From the author of the bestselling Suite Française. 
 
Ada grows up motherless in the Jewish pogroms of a Ukrainian city in the early years of the twentieth century. In the same city, Harry Sinner, the cosseted son of a city financier, belongs to a very different world. Eventually, in search of a brighter future, Ada moves to Paris and makes a living painting scenes from the world she has left behind. Harry Sinner also comes to Paris to mingle in exclusive circles, until one day he buys two paintings which remind him of his past and the course of Ada's life changes once more...

Jezebel

A dramatic tale of murder and passion in 1930s France from the author of David Golder and Suite Française.

Irène Némirovsky is the literary discovery of the decade

Slender, but engrossing, novel... Némirovsky's subtle twist and typically jewelled prose presents the glittering enormity of Gladys, an unsympathetic but vividly realised character who dominates this tale in a fascinating portrait of paranoid self-absorption

Nemirovsky's tale of a woman on trial for shooting her young lover rings more contemporary bells than we might think at first

Fast-paced and highly dramatic, it offers a fascinating glimpse into an inter-war world of privilege, wealth and Darwinian social combat

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, Le Bal and other works published in her lifetime or soon after, as well as the posthumous Suite Française and Fire in the Blood. In July 1942 she was arrested by the French police and interned in Pithiviers concentration camp, and from there immediately deported to Auschwitz where she died in August 1942.

From the author of the bestselling Suite Française. 
 
In a French courtroom, the trial of a woman is taking place. Gladys Eysenach is no longer young, but she is still beautiful, elegant, cold. She is accused of shooting dead her much-younger lover. As the witnesses take the stand and the case unfolds, Gladys relives fragments of her past: her childhood, her absent father, her marriage, her turbulent relationship with her daughter, her decline, and then the final irrevocable act. With the depth of insight and pitiless compassion we have come to expect from the author of Suite Française, Irène Némirovsky shows us the soul of a desperate woman obsessed with her lost youth.

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.

A gorgeous novel - witty, tender and true

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

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

A coolly crafted traditional family novel

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

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, Le Bal and other works published in her lifetime or soon after, as well as the posthumous Suite Française and Fire in the Blood. In July 1942 she was arrested by the French police and interned in Pithiviers concentration camp, and from there immediately deported to Auschwitz where she died in August 1942.

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

The Courilof Affair

A masterpiece of early 20th-century literature.

Nemirovsky not only unravels the machinations of a revolutionary mind, but rewrites historical events  - the novel is based on a real assassination. Like Sartre and Camus, Nemirovsky paints a fictional picture that resonates deep in the contemporary mind, ensuring that terrorism is something more than just a moral and philosophical question

Irène Némirovsky is a novelist of the very first order

From the author of the bestselling Suite Française. 
 
In 1903 Léon M - the son of two Russian revolutionaries - is given the responsibility of 'liquidating' Valerian Alexandrovitch Courilof, the notoriously brutal and cold-blooded Russian Minister of Education, by the Revolutionary Committee. The assassination, he is told, must take place in public and be carried out in the most grandiose manner possible in order to strike the imagination of the people. 
 
Posing as his newly appointed personal physician, Léon M takes up residence with Courilof in his summer house in the Iles and awaits instructions. But over the course of his stay he is made privy to the inner world of the man he must kill - his failing health, his troubled domestic situation and, most importantly, the tyrannical grip that the Czar himself holds over all his Ministers, forcing them to obey him or suffer the most deadly punishments. 
 
Set during a period of radical upheaval in European history, The Courliof Affair is an unsparing observation of human motives and the abuses of power, an elegy to a lost world and an unflinchingly topical cautionary tale.

Fire in the Blood

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

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

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

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

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

Irène Némirovksy 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, Le Bal and other works published in her lifetime, as well as the posthumous Suite Française. Prevented from publishing when the Germans occupied France in 1940, she stayed with her husband and two small daughters in the small village of Issy-l'Evèque (in German occupied territory) where she had moved from Paris just before the invasion. In July 1942 she was arrested by the French police and interned in Pithiviers concentration camp, and from there immediately deported to Auschwitz where she died in August 1942. The first French publication of Fire in the Blood, by the publishers who discovered and published Suite Française, was in March 2007.

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.

Four Novels

This collection of stories offers the same mastery of narrative, clarity of language and empathetic grasp of human behaviour that would give shape to Suite Française.

Nemirovsky has a great gift for describing the ordinariness that surrounds catastrophes... it is this ability to conjure up people, in all their moods and foibles, their selflessness or vanity, that makes Suite Francaise so remarkable

Readers everywhere were introduced to the work of Irène Némirovsky through the publication of her long-lost masterpiece, Suite Française. But Suite Française was only a coda to the brief yet remarkably prolific career of this nearly forgotten, yet hugely talented novelist, who fled Russia for Paris after the Revolution and died at Auschwitz at the age of 39. Here in one volume are four of Némirovsky's other novels - all of them newly translated by the award-winning Sandra Smith, and all, except David Golder, available in English for the first time. 
 
David Golder is the book that established Némirovsky's reputation in France in 1929 when she was twenty-six. It is a novel about greed and loneliness, the story of an ageing Russian Jewish businessman,an exile in France, learning to confront death and the knowledge that wealth has not brought him happiness. The Ball is both a sensitive exploration of adolescenceand a mercilessexposure of bourgeois social pretension. Snow in Autumn is an evocative tale of White Russian emigrés in Paris, while in The Courilof Affair a retired Russian revolutionary recalls an infamous assassinationcommitted in his youth. Introduced by novelist Claire Messud.

Le Bal

Two lost masterpieces of French literature gathered together in one volume for the first time.

With its cool, understated prose and sharp psychological accuracy, this is perfect for a train journey... A reminder of what good writing can achieve in a very few words

A cruel, sophisticated tale making the terrible beautiful without diminishing for one moment the horrors of displacement and war

It is quite outstanding, full of beauty, pain and truth... We are lucky to have this book

From the author of the bestselling Suite Française. 
 
Le Bal is a sharp, brittle story of a girl who sets out to ruin the mother she hates. The Kampfs have risen swiftly up the ranks of 1930s Parisian society. Painfully aware of her working-class roots, and desperate to win acceptance, Madame Kampf decides to throw a huge ball to announce her arrival to society. Her daughter Antoinette, who has just turned fourteen, dreams of attending, but Madame Kampf is resolved not to present her daughter to potential admirers. In a fury of adolescent rage and despair, Antoinette exacts a swift and horrible revenge... 
 
Snow in Autumn pays homage to Némirovsky's beloved Chekhov and chronicles the life of a devoted servant following her masters as they flee Revolutionary Moscow and emigrate to a life of hardship in Paris. As the crisis pushes the family to the brink of dissolution, Tatiana struggles to adapt to life in Paris and waits in vain for her cherished first snow of autumn.

David Golder

Published to coincide with the Vintage paperback edition of Suite Francaise.

Her deceptively simply and understated style is best suited to shorter fiction: her touch is light, but with an underlying darkness that bears witness to exile, marginality and existential frustration

This is a writer of rare power, make no mistake

A sordid tragedy that makes us for the thousandth time question the worth of human existence. The impression remains with the reader that it is the work of a woman who has the strength of one of the masters like Balzac or Dostoyevsky

A powerful description of a man's relentless decline

Striking first work, sensitively translated by Sandra Smith

From the author of the bestselling Suite Française. 
 
Translated by Sandra Smith, with an introduction by Patrick Marnham. 
 
In 1929, 26-year-old Irène Némirovsky shot to fame in France with the publication of her second novel David Golder. At the time, only the most prescient would have predicted the events that led to her extraordinary final novel Suite Française and her death at Auschwitz. Yet the clues are there in this astonishingly mature story of an elderly Jewish businessman who has sold his soul. 
 
Golder is a superb creation. Born into poverty on the Black Sea, he has clawed his way to fabulous wealth by speculating on gold and oil. When the novel opens, he is at work in his magnificent Parisian apartment while his wife and beloved daughter, Joyce`, spend his money at their villa in Biarritz. But Golder's security is fragile. For years he has defended his business interests from cut-throat competitors. Now his health is beginning to show the strain. As his body betrays him, so too do his wife and child, leaving him to decide which to pursue: revenge or altruism? 
 
Available for the first time since 1930, David Golder is a page-turningly chilling and brilliant portrait of the frenzied capitalism of the 1920s and a universal parable about the mirage of wealth.

Irène Némirovsky

Sandra Smith

Vintage Classics French Series

The second world war classic of life under Nazi occupation. Némirovsky was sent to Auschwitz in 1942. 
 
In 1941, Irène sat down to write a book that would convey the magnitude of what she was living through by evoking the domestic lives and personal trials of the ordinary citizens of France. Némirovsky's death in Auschwitz in 1942 prevented her from seeing the day, sixty-five years later, that the existing two sections of her planned novel sequence, Suite Française, would be rediscovered and hailed as a masterpiece. 
 
Set during the year that France fell to the Nazis, Suite Française falls into two parts. The first is a brilliant depiction of a group of Parisians as they flee the Nazi invasion; the second follows the inhabitants of a small rural community under occupation. Suite Française is a novel that teems with wonderful characters struggling with the new regime. However, amidst the mess of defeat, and all the hypocrisy and compromise, there is hope. True nobility and love exist, but often in surprising places. 
 
VINTAGE FRENCH CLASSICS - six masterpieces of French fiction in collectable editions. 
 
'A masterpiece of French fiction' Sunday Times 
 
'One of those rare books that demands to be read' Guardian

Irène Némirovsky

Books by Irène Némirovsky

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Where to start with French Classics

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