Suite Française - Irène Némirovsky

This book provided a fascinating glimpse into life in France following the German occupation in 1940. The first part portrayed the chaos and desperation of the masses fleeing Paris following the initial reports of the German advance, and the second, which made more of an impression on me, described life in a small village as it returned to a sort of uneasy calm despite the presence of occupying German soldiers. A tentative romance between a French woman and a German officer was well described, as were the ongoing tensions between personal and political sensibilities, identities and loyalties. Unusually for me, I actually found myself shouting at some minor characters in the book at one point when I felt that they were being particularly thoughtless and naive... Perhaps the most compelling part of the book were the two appendices, one containing the author's notes on her plans for this series of novels, and the other consisting of a set of deeply sad correspondence showing her difficulties in surviving under the increasing restrictions placed on Jews in occupied France, and her husband's desperate attempts to obtain news of her after her arrest (which, heartbreakingly, continued after we now know that she had died at Auschwitz).

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves - Karen Joy Fowler

I absolutely ADORED this book, and was relieved to find that my prior knowledge of it from reading several detailed reviews did not spoil it for me at all. I think that this was because, in addition to being brilliantly written, it took a subject that already fascinated me and explored it from a new perspective, subverting my expectations around issues of perceived capabilities, direction of influence, and family relationships, and considering the long-term implications of an unusual situation through well-realised characters and compellingly ambivalent relationships. One particular memory of how the narrator's sister used to "press her face and body into my back, match me step for step when we walked, as if we were a single person" resonated with me as it is something my own children do a lot at the moment. I can also thank the author for introducing me to the "uncanny valley" effect, which I found highly intriguing.