Used book – Les Vierges et autres nouvelles, Irène Némirovsky, Olivier Philipponnat

Women brought down by fortune that has ceased to obey them. Men brutally stripped of their assets. Mothers consumed by regret for "time abolished." Sons and daughters haunted by the curse of heredity. Rarely has Irène Némirovsky's irony wreaked such havoc as in this volume full of "distant warnings." However fragile the fate of Anne, Marcelle, or Camille may be, a thread connects them to life. It runs throughout these twelve short stories, some previously unpublished or out of print, which offer an unexpected glimpse into her talent in areas such as screenwriting or ghost stories. Questioning the whims of fate as her own unfolds, the author of Suite Française imbues her art with bitterness before turning it against herself in "The Virgins," the last text published during her lifetime: "I am alone now, like you, not with a chosen, sought-after solitude, but with the worst kind of solitude, humiliated, bitter, that of abandonment, of betrayal..."