Master of Souls - Tapa dura

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Irène Némirovsky was born in Kiev, Ukraine, in 1903 into a wealthy Jewish family. From there they moved to St. Peters-burg, Russia where she continued a life of privilege until the Bolshevik Revolution caused the family to emigrate to Fin-land, then to Sweden, and finally to France in 1919 where she immersed herself in the company of thinkers, artists, musi-cians and cultural elites as a part of the Parisian literati of her time.

Sixty-two years after her death, in 2004, Irène Némirovsky’s never-before-published Suite Française, a novel of France during the German Occupation, received the prestigious Prix Renaudot, and brought international acclaim to this gifted writer whose life was tragically lost in the Holocaust. She passed from typhus in 1942 in the Auschwitz concentration camp at the age of thirty-nine, leaving behind two young daughters and an enduring legacy in literature.

Sandra Smith was born and raised in New York City. As an undergraduate, she spent one year studying at the Sorbonne and fell in love with Paris. Immediately after finishing her BA, she was accepted to do a Master's Degree at New York University, in conjunction with the Sorbonne, and so lived in Paris for another year. After completing her MA, she moved to Cambridge, where she began supervising in 20th Century French Literature, Modern French Drama and Translation at the University. Soon afterwards, she was accepted to study for a PhD at Clare College, researching the Surrealist Theatre in France between the two World Wars. Sandra Smith taught French Literature and Language at Robinson College, University of Cambridge for many years and has been a guest lecturer and professor at Columbia University, Harvard and Sarah Lawrence College.

• Winner of the Pen Book of the Month Club Translation Prize (USA) 2006
• Winner of the French-American Florence Gould Foundation Translation Prize (USA) 2007
• The Quill Award, USA, shortlisted for Book of the Year 2006, General Fiction category. (The only book in translation shortlisted.)
• Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize for Fiction 2006. Shortlisted.
• Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize for Fiction 2006. Shortlisted.
• British Book Awards: Border's Book of the Year 2006. Shortlisted.
• The Oxford Weidenfeld Prize for French Translation. Shortlisted.
• Independent Newspaper Foreign Fiction Prize: only open to living authors, so ineligible, but awarded a 'Special Commendation' by the panel 19 January 2007.

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Each of Dario’s thoughts brought up a flood of memories. Whenever he thought, “We’ll be sent away. We’ll leave. We’ll have no-where to rest our heads. We won’t know where to go,” the images awakened in him did not come from his mind alone, but were carved into his flesh, flesh that had known the cold, and were burned into his eyes, which had stung from exhaustion at the end of a long night of homelessness. More than once he hadn’t known where he would sleep; he had wandered the streets, been thrown out of hotels. But all of that, which had seemed normal in his childhood, in adoles-cence, in his first penniless student years, today seemed like the kindof degradation that made death seem preferable. Yes, Europe had made him soft, that much was certain.