The Fires of Autumn

The prequel to Suite Française: a coruscating, powerful story about one man's rise and fall and the brutal impact of war.

After four years of bloody warfare Bernard Jacquelain returns from the trenches a changed man. No more the naïve hopes and dreams of the teenager who went to war. Attracted by the lure of money and success, Bernard falls in with Renée and Raymond Détang, a couple whose life of luxuriant delinquency is supported by suspect financial dealings and loose morals. Yet when Renée Détang throws him off, he turns to his wholesome childhood friend Thérèse for comfort.
For ten years Bernard lives the good bourgeois life, but the allure of the Détangs draws him back, and he abandons Thérèse and their three children. But as another war threatens, Bernard and his son Yves are called up together. Yet they have very different wars: young Yves dies a futile unheroic death, whilst Bernard is captured by the Germans. He returns to Thérèse, now hiding in the countryside with her daughters (as Némirovsky did herself in 1941) a broken man.
The prequel to her masterpiece, Suite Française, The Fires of Autumn is a panoramic exploration of French life and a witness to the horrors of the twentieth century. Published posthumously in 1957, it is a coruscating, tragic evocation of the reality of war and its dirty aftermath, and the ugly colour it can turn a man’s soul.