Suite Française

Sometimes a book takes the world by storm and, nearly as quickly, recedes from awareness. Buoyed in part by the drama of its writing and rediscovery (Nemirovsky wrote this fictional account of the French occupation as she was experiencing it herself, leaving it unfinished when she was sent to her death in the camps in 1942), it was one of the books of the year when it appeared in the U.S. in 2006, but I had hardly thought of it myself in recent years until a customer, for the first time in over a year, bought a copy last week. But what a book it is: beautiful and complex, full of human warmth and human pettiness and human evil (much of which is implicit, in the book's cruelly unfinished state). It's worth a second look.