News for Suite Francaise Lovers

Apparently, they found another novel Irène Némirovsky was working on during World War II.

What links “Dolce” and “Chaleur du Sang” is that both are set in a village inspired by Issy-l’Évêque in Burgundy, where Némirovsky vacationed before the war and where she and her family escaped after the fall of Paris. “Chaleur du Sang,” which will be published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf this fall, even names the Hôtel des Voyageurs, where Némirovsky stayed in Issy-l’Évêque for some months in 1940.

However, in this novel — which her biographers believe was conceived as early as 1937 though it was written at the same time as “Suite Française” — there is no suggestion of war. Rather, in the spirit of a novel by, say, Jane Austen, it dwells on intense, often repressed emotional conflict set against bucolic country life.