In this work, the first critical monograph on Suite française, Nathan Bracher shows how, first amid the chaos and panic of the May-June 1940 debacle, and then within the unsettling new order of the German occupation, Némirovsky's novel casts a particularly revealing light on the behavior and attitudes of the French as well as on the highly problematic interaction of France's social classes

"He was named Jorge, like me, and for this his life hurts me twice." So writes Jorge Volpi in this highly original novel that presents a biographical perspective on the tragic life of the poet and chemist Jorge Cuesta. Cuesta was one of the founders of Los Contemporáneos, an influential twentieth-century literary movement. The poetic voice of Cuesta's verses can be heard throughout, offering insights into the creative and destructive forces and impulses in his work that eventually led to a mental ward—and a shocking suicide at thirty-eight. The fictional "Jorge," as narrator, embarks on an obsessive quest to understand the life of the long-dead poet, with the distance between subject and researcher blurring as he finds himself struggling to understand his own life. It is a brave search for anyone willing to gaze into the mirror of mortality "in spite of the dark silence."

Alan Dower Blumlein was a genius and has been described as the greatest British electronics engineer of the twentieth century. Although he was tragically killed at the age of 38, he contributed enormously to the fields of telephony and electrical measurements, monophonic and stereophonic recording and reproduction, high definition television, electronics, antennas and cables, and radar systems of various types. His accidental death in June 1942 was described by an Air Chief Marshal as 'a catastrophe', and the Secretary of State for Air said that 'it would be impossible to over-rate the importance of the work on which [Blumlein was] engaged': his loss was a 'national disaster'. He was responsible for saving many thousands of lives during the Second World War, and his endeavours in peacetime led to pleasure being given to millions of people.