Recommendations
Books Like Suite Française
Best books to read after Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky
Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française is the masterpiece she wrote during the occupation, found in a notebook sixty years after her death in Auschwitz. These recommendations explore the WWII French occupation fiction tradition, or offer companion reading in the tradition of the novel that captures a historical catastrophe from inside it, with no knowledge of how it will end.
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Buy on AmazonThe Nightingale
by Kristin Hannah
The most popular recent French WWII companion — two sisters in occupied France, Hannah's bestselling novel engaging the same geography and moral landscape as Suite Française's 'Dolce' movement but in a more explicitly narrative, emotionally direct register.
- 2
Buy on AmazonAll the Light We Cannot See
by Anthony Doerr
The Pulitzer Prize WWII companion — a blind French girl and a German soldier in occupied France, Doerr's formal novel sharing Suite Française's commitment to showing the German occupation of France from inside the experience.
- 3Buy on Amazon
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
The British island occupation companion — a book club formed under German occupation, the epistolary novel set in the same period as Suite Française's 'Dolce' but finding warmth and community in the same circumstances.
- 4
Buy on AmazonCaptain Corelli's Mandolin
by Louis de Bernieres
The Mediterranean occupation companion — an Italian officer and a Greek doctor's daughter during the occupation of Cephalonia, sharing Suite Française's interest in the human relationships formed between occupied and occupier.
- 5
Buy on AmazonThe Tattooist of Auschwitz
by Heather Morris
The Holocaust companion — the true story of Lale Sokolov tattooing prisoner numbers at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the novel that most directly addresses what happened to people like Némirovsky herself in the camps that Suite Française's readers know ended her life and her novel.
- 6
Buy on AmazonFire in the Blood
by Irene Nemirovsky
The companion Némirovsky novel — a tale of passion, betrayal, and inheritance in the French countryside, written in 1941; the closest in setting and tone to the 'Dolce' movement of Suite Française and the best entry point to Némirovsky's other work.
- 7
Buy on AmazonThe Alice Network
by Kate Quinn
The dual-timeline French espionage companion — 1947 and WWI occupied France, Quinn's novel sharing Suite Française's interest in what ordinary French men and women do under German occupation and the moral complexity of the choices that occupation forces.
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Buy on AmazonNight
by Elie Wiesel
The first-hand Holocaust companion — Wiesel's account of his deportation from Hungary to Auschwitz and Buchenwald at fifteen, the book that most directly tells the story of what happened to Némirovsky and the millions of European Jews whose fates Suite Française cannot describe because she died before she could write them.
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