Thérèse Dallas in Lunch in September is turning 40. She is disappointed in both her reflection and her life. She meets an old flame, a lost chance at love – and misses her chance again. All the other stories in Irène Némirovsky's collection In Confidence also concern lost opportunities, changing times and a vanishing past in narratives that contain profound truths and absorbing historical detail. In this translation by Eoin Bates and Sandrine Brisset there are nuances of the author's Ukrainian-Jewish origins and of French, the language she spoke in Paris, for the second half of her life, which ended at Auschwitz, at the age of 39, in 1942. Némirovsky's protagonists are paralysed by indecision and introspection, often echoing Chekhov and Tolstoy. Her characters, all unhappy in their own way, are resigned and philosophical. In a period seeded with change and rooted in tradition, these beautifully collated stories illuminate that other country the past.
