In 1929, 26-year-old Irène Némirovsky shot to fame in France with the publication of her first novel David Golder. At the time, only the most prescient would have predicted the events that led to her extraordinary final novel Suite Française and her death at Auschwitz. Yet the clues are there in this astonishingly mature story of an elderly Jewish businessman who has sold his soul.

Golder is a superb creation. Born into poverty on the Black Sea, he has clawed his way to fabulous wealth by speculating on gold and oil. When the novel opens, he is at work in his magnificent Parisian apartment while his wife and beloved daughter, Joy, spend his money at their villa in Biarritz. But Golder’s security is fragile. For years he has defended his business interests from cut-throat competitors. Now his health is beginning to show the strain. As his body betrays him, so too do his wife and child, leaving him to decide which to pursue: revenge or altruism?

Available for the first time since 1930, David Golder is a page-turningly chilling and brilliant portrait of the frenzied capitalism of the 1920s and a universal parable about the mirage of wealth.

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Praise for the first edition of David Golder:
"The work of a woman who has the strength of one of the masters like Balzac or Dostoyevsky"
–New York Times, 1930

"All Némirovsky’s talent is apparent in her first novel: her pitiless gaze and her generous heart … Suite Française may take the crown, but her other works confirm that she was not simply the chronicler of June 1940, but a writer with a very broad canvas who has finally found her place in the history of literature."
–Lire

"A novelist of the very first order, perceptive to a fault and sly in her emotional restraint."
–Evening Standard

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Born in Kiev in 1903, Irène Némirovsky fled the Russian Revolution for France where she became an acclaimed novelist. She wrote over 10 novels, including an unfinished magnum opus Suite Française which was published posthumously in France in 2004 and has become an international bestseller. She died in Auschwitz in 1942.

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