The Fires of Autumn

The prequel to Suite Francaise a coruscating, powerful story about one man’s rise and fall and the brutal impact of war.
After four years of bloody warfare Bernard Jacquelain returns from the trenches a changed man. No more the naive hopes and dreams of the teenager who went to war. Attracted by the lure of money and success, Bernard falls in with Renee and Raymond Detang, a couple whose life of luxuriant delinquency is supported by suspect financial dealings and loose morals. Yet when Renee Detang throws him off, he turns to his wholesome childhood friend Therese for comfort.
For ten years Bernard lives the good bourgeois life, but the allure of the Detangs draws him back, and he abandons Therese and their three children. But as another war threatens, Bernard and his son Yves are called up together. Yet they have very different wars: young Yves dies a futile unheroic death, whilst Bernard is captured by the Germans. He returns to Therese, now hiding in the countryside with her daughters (as Nemirovsky did herself in 1941) a broken man.
The prequel to her masterpiece, Suite Francaise, The Fires of Autumn is a panoramic exploration of French life and a witness to the horrors of the twentieth century. Published posthumously in 1957, it is a coruscating, tragic evocation of the reality of war and its dirty aftermath, and the ugly colour it can turn a man s soul.”