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Jezebel

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Published on Dec 17, 2014 | 208 Pages

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Published on Dec 17, 2014 | 208 Pages

Buy from Other Retailers:

A stunning novel about mothers and daughters, about vengeance, and an aging, still beautiful woman on trial for shooting her lover.

In a French courtroom, the trial of a woman is taking place. Gladys Eysenach is no longer young, but she remains striking, elegant, cold. She is accused of shooting dead her much-younger lover. As the witnesses take the stand and the case unfolds, Gladys relives fragments of her past: her childhood, her absent father, her marriage, her turbulent relationship with her daughter, her decline, and then the final irrevocable act. With the depth of insight and pitiless compassion we have come to expect from the acclaimed author of Suite Francaise, Irene Nemirovsky shows us the soul of a desperate woman obsessed with her lost youth.

Praise for Irene Nemirovsky and Jezebel:

“Engrossing. . . . A fascinating portrait of paranoid self-absorption.”
—Financial Times

“Fast-paced and highly dramatic, Jezebel offers a fascinating glimpse into an inter-war world of privilege, wealth and Darwinian social combat.”
—New Statesman

“Nemirovsky wrote, for all to read at last, some of the greatest, most humane and inclusive fiction that conflict has produced.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Nemirovsky’s scope is like that of Tolstoy: She sees the fullness of humanity and its tenuous arrangements and manages to put them together with a tone that is affectionate, patient, and relentlessly honest.”
—O, The Oprah Magazine

“Extraordinary. . . . Nemirovsky achieves her penetrating insights with Flaubertian objectivity.”
—The Washington Post Book World

“Brilliant. . . . [Nemirovsky wrote] with supreme lucidity [and] expressed with great emotional precision her understanding of the country that betrayed her.”
—The Nation

“Transcendent, astonishing. . . . Like Anne Frank, Irene Nemirovsky was unaware of neither her circumstance nor the growing probability that she might not survive. And still, she writes to us.”
—The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Author

Irene Nemirovsky

Irène Némirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903 into a successful banking family. Trapped in Moscow by the Russian Revolution, she and her family fled first to a village in Finland, and eventually to France, where she attended the Sorbonne. Irène Némirovsky achieved early success as a writer: her first novel, David Golder, published when she was twenty-six, was a sensation. By 1937 she had published nine further books and David Golder had been made into a film; she and her husband Michel Epstein, a bank executive, moved in fashionable social circles. When the Germans occupied France in 1940, she moved with her husband and two small daughters, aged 5 and 13, from Paris to the comparative safety of Issy-L’Evêque. It was there that she secretly began writing Suite Française. Though her family had converted to Catholicism, she was arrested on 13 July, 1942, and interned in the concentration camp at Pithiviers. She died in Auschwitz in August of that year.

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Jezebel

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