Well-researched and perceptive account of the life and work of Irene Némirovsky, which brings the story up to the present day based on interviews with her daughters and descendants. It’s easy to forget, after the runaway success of Suite Française in 2004, that Némirovsky was already an established author in France in the 1930s before her arrest, and with great insight the author examines the so-called Némirovsky question – namely Némirovsky relationship with Judaism, her own Jewish identity and her relationship and attitude to her fellow Jews. More than a simple cradle-to-grave biography, this is a very interesting and enlightening account of the writer whose life was cut so cruelly short.