A real literary find - an unpublished jewel from the author of the internationally bestselling Suite Francaise

Irene Nemirovksy was born in Kiev in 1903, the daughter of a successful Jewish banker. In 1918 her family fled the Russian Revolution for France where she became a bestselling novelist, author of David Golder, Le Bal and other works published in her lifetime, as well as the posthumous Suite Francaise. Prevented from publishing when the Germans occupied France in 1940, she stayed with her husband and two small daughters in the small village of Issy-l'Eveque (in German occupied territory) where she had moved from Paris just before the invasion. In July 1942 she was arrested by the French police and interned in Pithiviers concentration camp, and from there immediately deported to Auschwitz where she died in August 1942. The first French publication of Fire in the Blood, by the publishers who discovered and published Suite Francaise, was in March 2007.