Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky:  I have never read a book which is both hard to put down and hard to pick up.  The writing is beautiful, telling about life in France during WWII, done in two novella’s. The first is set during the exodus from Paris as the Germans invaded, the second tells of country life when France was occupied by Germany.  The first has wicked humor about the privileged Parisians, as well as a sense of a mob not knowing where to go or what to do as they ran out of gas and food.   The book is a bit slow in parts, there is no exciting plot.  But it’s fascinating with the feel of “what it must have really been like” and the focus on possessions (and what was considered precious).  The second is about the politics that go on even during occupation, and almost a love story. The hard part was knowing the real story, that the author (and her husband) were killed at Auschwitz just months after this was written.  That after she was taken, her husband expected she would be back.  It seems ironic that while she could see the petty evilness on how the French treated each other, she did not understand the true evil led by Hitler.