Thanks to books like Charlotte Gray and Birdsong and TV programmes like (I'm slightly ashamed to say) 'Allo 'Allo I've grown up with a belief in French patriotic solidarity - one for all and all for one against the invading Germans. That belief is now in tatters thanks to Suite Francaise.

This book is the first two sections of the five part epic that Nemirovsky had intended to write.

In the first section, A Storm in June, we experience the exodus from Paris through the eyes of around 6 families as the German army draws near. Most of the characters are wealthy, spoiled and self-centred. I found myself silently screaming at some of the worst offenders as they complained about their food and lodgings - be glad you're alive! Motivated by greed and fear, they are more concerned with their precious possessions that their fellow man - where was their much vaunted fraternity?

As the convoy of Parisians travels south, thoughts turn to the horrors of the war to come. This contrasts with Nemirovsky's loving descriptions of the French countryside.

The second section, Dolce, is a portrait of the small, rural town of Bussy, and looks at how life goes on under occupation. With a German soldier billeted in almost every home, Dolce touches on the local's relationships with the occupying troops. The almost impecable behaviour of the individual German officers contrasts greatly with the selfish upper classes.

As Nemirovsky wrote the book in 1941 she had little or no knowledge of the Nazi atrocities. It seems strange and remarkable that she humanised the monster that was soon to kill her and her husband.

The appendice gives an insight in the author's life and I found it more gripping than the novel itself.

Born in Kiev in 1903, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish banker, Irene fled Russia to France in 1918. She led a privileged life and became a critically-acclaimed writer. But all that changed in 1939 and she was forced to send her two daughters to the country, where she and her husband joined them two years later. By this time 'laws governing the status of Jews' had been pronounced by the collaborationist French government. Irene's husband Michel was barred from working in his bank, while she was dropped by the literary establishment.

Irene was arrested in 1942, days after finishing Dolce. She survived only 10 days in Auschwitz. Her husband's increasingly desperate letters and telegrams, trying to establish his wife's whereabouts, are printed in the appendice. He was arrested and deprted two months later.

Amazingly their daughters survived in hiding and in their possession a suitcase containing, among other things, their mother's manuscript.

We may prefer to remember that the French barely tolerated the Vichy government and resisted the Germans. Irene Nemirovsky saw something different.