A searing portrait of the lasting damages of war, here is Irène Némirovsky’s spiritual prequel to her international bestseller Suite Française. At the end of the First World War, Bernard Jacquelain returns from the trenches a changed man. Broken by the unspeakable horrors he has witnessed, he becomes addicted to the lure of wealth and success. Cynical, disillusioned and selfish, he wallows in the corruption and excess of post-war Paris, but when his lover abandons him, Bernard turns to a childhood friend for comfort. For ten years, he lives the good bourgeois life, but when the drums of war begin to sound again, everything he has rebuilt himself around starts to crumble, and the future—for his marriage and for his country—suddenly becomes terribly uncertain. Written after Némirovsky fled Paris in 1940, just two years before her death, and first published in France in 1957, The Fires of Autumn is a coruscating, tragic evocation of the reality of war and its aftermath, and of the ugly color it can turn a man’s soul.
