"The way a man drinks in company tells you nothing about him. But the way he drinks when alone reveals, without him realising it, the very depths of his soul." Irène Némirovsky was a successful novelist between the wars, whose distinctive voice was rediscovered with the emergence of Suite Française, an unfinished manuscript cut short when she was sent to Auschwitz. Now an earlier unpublished novella, Fire in the Blood, has been unearthed. Narrated by Jim Norton, who can get into character as if he is slipping on gloves, it lends itself wonderfully to being heard. The theme of shared secret memories unfolds like a peeled onion, framed by descriptive passages of rural France as vivid as paintings.(The Times)

Given its provenance, Suite Française (Némirovsky's half-finished bestseller about the German occupation of France, published 60 years after she died in Auschwitz) was less a hard act to follow than an impossible one. But no, the manuscript of another novel, written in 1932, has turned up, every bit as good if not better than Suite Française, first because it's complete and second because it's read by Jim Norton. It's a love story (or rather a succession of dangerous liaisons) set in the same rural area as the latter half of Suite Française, where land is more important than love, family feuds are passed down the generations and every isolated farmhouse has a secret. Great plot, wonderful characters, lucid prose - well, why not? Némirovsky was Russian.(The Guardian)