Set in the earliest days of the French occupation by the Nazis in the summer of 1941, Suite Française is an unfinished set of short novels by the French-Jewish writer Irène Némirovsky.

The first short novel – Tempête en Juin (Storm in June) – follows the lives of multiple Parisians in the days immediately prior to the occupation of the capital city, as the French army is failing at the eastern front. The citizens veer from faith in their military to disbelief in the possibility of defeat to panicked flight before the oncoming Germans. Major characters include the Michauds, a middle-aged couple who work for a large bank; their boss, an adulterous boob who gives away their seats in an evacuation car to his mistress and her luggage; the Michaud’s son, an injured soldier; a pompous writer and his mistress; and a wealthy family fleeing the bombardment of Paris for their additional home in the south. As chaos erupts, Némirovsky’s characters make difficult choices, rise to higher moral standards, abandon their principles, and bully and steal their way to survival. By the end of this short novel, an armistice is reached and a bit of normality returns.

In the second short novel – Dolce (Sweet) – characters in Bussy, a country town in the suburbs of Paris, adapt to life under occupation. The mother of a prisoner of war chafes at the burden of putting up a German officer in her home, while an escaped POW believes another officer has designs on his wife. Brief affairs spring up among the German soldiers and young women from the town, and even some of their elders find themselves less resentful of their occupiers, who spend freely at their shops. While mostly disconnected from Storm in June, the novel features a few minor characters in expanded roles, including the family who took in the injured Jean-Marie Michaud. The Michauds and the wealthy Pericands are mentioned in passing. The novel concludes with the occupying soldiers departing for Germany’s eastern front, after the invasion of the Soviet Union begins.

A third novel – Captivité (Captivity) – was outlined but never written, and would have featured some of the characters from the first two sections connecting with the resistance. Fourth and fifth novels – potentially called Batailles (Battles) and La Paix (Peace) – exist as nothing more than titles in Némirovsky’s notebooks, as the war had not yet played out. “It’s really in the lap of the gods since it depends on what happens,” she wrote.

Sadly, Némirovsky would never truly complete any of this work. She was arrested in the summer of 1942 and sent to Auschwitz, where she died of typhus.

Written while Némirovsky was living under occupation after abandoning Paris with her family, the two completed novels chillingly capture the chaos and urgency of people facing an imminent invasion of their homeland. Morally smug characters who believe their wealth renders them immune to disruption find themselves grubbing for food and transportation, fleeing burning buildings, and placing survival above their principles. Others surround themselves with material goods and comforts, valuing them more than the lives of refugees or even their co-workers. In Dolce, one of the main characters falls in love with an occupier and another cajoles her neighbors for donations for refugees while hoarding her own goods and dining with German officers.

Deftly written and morally complex, Suite Française places the reader in the heart of Paris and its people. I can’t remember a novel where I felt so literally within the story world, which isn’t surprising, sadly, given that’s exactly where Némirovsky herself lived and died.