Editions

The Wine of Solitude

  • Imprint: Vintage

  • ISBN: 9780099520375

  • Length: 256  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 16mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 181g

  • RRP: £12.99

The Wine of Solitude

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.

  • Imprint: Vintage

  • ISBN: 9780099520375

  • Length: 256  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 16mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 181g

  • RRP: £12.99

Reviews

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

    Helen Dunmore, Guardian, Books of the Year

  • "Haunting...profound...exquisitely wrought"

    Independent on Sunday

  • "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"

    Guardian

  • "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"

    Financial Times

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

    Scotsman

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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 . 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 has translated twelve novels by Irène Némirovsky as well as a new translation of Camus’ The Outsider. Némirovsky’s Suite Française won her the French American Foundation and Florence Gould Foundation Prize and The PEN Translation Prize. Five of her translations have been adapted as radio plays and broadcast on the BBC. Suite Française is the first to become a film.

Irène Némirovsky

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