The Wine of Solitude - Tapa blanda

Introspective, intense and poignant, "The Wine of Solitude" is the most autobiographical of all Irene Nemirovsky's novels, now available in English for the first time. Imbued with melancholy, and regret, it explores the troubled relationship between a young girl, her distant, self-absorbed mother and her mother's lover, Max. We follow the family through the Great War and the Russian Revolution, as the young Helene grows from a dreamy, unhappy child into an angry young woman. Through hot summers in a fictionalised Kiev (Nemirovsky's own birthplace) and the cruel winters of St Petersburg, the would-be writer Helene blossoms, despite her mother's neglect, into a clear-eyed observer of the life around her. "The Wine of Solitude" is a powerful tale not of a less of the end of innocence, than disillusionment; the story of an upbringing that produces a young woman as hard as a diamond, prepared to wreak a shattering revenge on her mother.

Irene Nemirovksy was born in Kiev in 1903, the daughter of a successful Jewish banker. In 1918 her family fled the Russian Revolution for France where she became a bestselling novelist, author of David Golder, Le Bal and other works published in her lifetime, as well as the posthumous Suite Francaise. The Wine of Solitude (Le Vin de Solitude) was first published in France in 1935. Prevented from publishing when the Germans occupied France in 1940, she stayed with her husband and two small daughters in the small village of Issy-l'Eveque (in German occupied territory). In July 1942 she was arrested by the French police and interned in Pithiviers concentration camp, and from there immediately deported to Auschwitz where she died in August 1942.