By the early 1940s, Ukrainian-born Irene Nemirovsky was already a highly successful writer living in Paris. But she was also a Jew, and in 1942 she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz: a month later she was dead at the age of thirty-nine. Two years earlier she'd begun a five-part epic of the human drama in which she herself would become a victim. Her daughters took the two completed parts with them into hiding. At long last, we can read Nemirovsky's masterpiece.