Written on the fly in the early years of World War II, the two novellas in this unfinished masterpiece chart the French exodus from Paris and then the complicated story of life in a German-occupied village. Némirovsky, a Ukrainian Jew who settled in Paris after the Russian Revolution and found a home in the literary world until the Nazi invasion, turned a practiced eye on her countrymen to produce a lucid picture of life at the crossroads, revealing the true colors of a seemingly infinite variety of people—and then she was deported to Auschwitz, where she died in 1942. Her daughters took her manuscripts into hiding, and more than sixty years later, after a painstaking transcription of her script, we can discover the textures and dimensions of the central French tragedy of the twentieth century. It was worth the wait, even if we cannot help imagining what Némirovsky might have created had she survived—and then mourning the loss of such a talent.