The first novel, Tempête en juin (Storm in June) depicts the flight of citizens from Paris in the hours preceding the German advance and in the days following it.
The second, Dolce (Sweet), shows life in a small French country town, Bussy (in the suburbs just east of Paris), in the first, strangely peaceful, months of the German occupation.
The third novel, Captivité (Captivity), for which Némirovsky left a plot outline, would have shown the coalescing of a resistance, with some characters introduced in Tempête en juin and Dolce having been arrested and put under threat of death, in Paris.
The fourth and fifth novels would perhaps have been called Batailles (Battles) and La Paix (Peace) but these exist only as titles in Némirovsky's notebook, against which she had placed question marks.
They reach the city but in the course of the journey, Charlotte Péricand's senile father-in-law is left behind (forgotten) while her second son, Hubert, runs away to join the army and shares in its collapse.
Her elder son, Philippe, is a priest and is shepherding a party of orphans, who eventually kill him (in a death scene perhaps in need of revision, Némirovsky comments in her notebook, because it is melo [melodramatic]).
Charles Langelet, an aesthete, flees alone in his car, filching petrol from trusting acquaintances in order to get as far as the Loire; he returns to Paris and, in the blackout, is killed in a road accident.
In this and several parallel strands, the novel explores the deep, perhaps unbridgeable, differences and the perhaps superficial sympathies, between military Germans and rural French.
The German troops celebrate the first anniversary of their entry into Paris, and Dolce ends in July 1941, when Germany begins its invasion of the Soviet Union.
Lucile and Bruno fear that he will not survive and she has no difficulty in persuading him to give her a travel document and petrol coupon, which (unknown to him) will enable her to drive Benoît to a new refuge.
In a sub-plot, the writer Gabriel Corte, a relatively minor and unsympathetic character in Tempête en juin, emerges as a propagandist and politician, initially collaborating with the Germans, later perhaps disaffected; Benoît dies brutally and full of hope.
It would possibly be the earliest work of literary fiction about the Second World War, and is remarkable as a historical novel sequence written during the period that it depicts, transformed far beyond the level of a journal of events such as might be expected to emerge from the turmoil and tragedy Némirovsky experienced.
It is extraordinary that the manuscript should have survived in such extreme circumstances, having been carried by Irene Némirovsky's daughter Denise as she was helped to flee from one hiding place to another during the war.
[7][8] In the July/August 2006 issue of Bookmarks, the book received a (4.5 out of 5) with the critical summary saying, "Still, Suite Française may be considered "the last great fiction of the war" (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)".
[11] In The New York Times, Paul Gray called the book "stunning" and argued that it ranks with "the greatest, most humane and incisive fiction that conflict has produced.
[15] Some readers have noticed similarities between Bruce Marshall's 1943 novel Yellow Tapers for Paris and Irène Némirovsky's Suite française which was written at about the same time but not discovered until 1998.
"Dolce," the second part of Suite française, is similar to Le Silence de la mer, a novella by the French author Vercors (pseudonym of Jean Bruller).
[17] Ronald Harwood, who wrote the script for The Pianist, was set to write the screenplay, with Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall producing the film.
[18] Production began to move forward in 2012, with Michelle Williams starring as Lucille Angellier alongside Kristin Scott Thomas as her mother-in-law, and Matthias Schoenaerts as Bruno von Falk.