Fire in the Blood is set just before World War II in the French village of Issy-l'Eveque, the same village used in Irene Nemirovsky's acclaimed
Suite Francaise. Silvio has spent a lifetime traveling the world before returning to the village and living in seclusion in a farmer's hovel. He attends the wedding of his cousin, Colette, a young woman with fire in her blood, who yearns for a long happy marriage like her parents have. Her husband's death a few years later is treated by the villagers as an accident, even though it looks suspicious. Silvio knows there's more to the truth than the telling, and he finds a web of secrets and lies that unravel everything.
Fire in the Blood has received positive reviews with the London Times saying, "In a book fuelled with images of fire and embers, Nemirovsky brilliantly depicts a closed-in, inward-looking community, then gives what happens in it universal resonance by exhibiting not only what people do to each other but what the passing of time does to us all."
