I was completely blown away by how brilliant this book is: It is the very definition of a literary gem. A thin, unpretentious story that manages to be both breathtaking and mundane, cutting to the very heart of what it is to be human. It is a story of age and youth, reminiscence and of simmering passions settling down. It is one of those really amazing stories that captures your imagination and binds you to the people in it. There were previously only thirty or so pages of Fire in the Blood, because Némirovsky’s husband was in the process of typing it when she was arrested in 1942. Fortunately in 2005 the rest of the original handwritten manuscript was rediscovered. For me, this makes the novel all the more extraordinary – to think of what the reading world would have lost along with some pieces of paper.