Novel rediscovered decades after author's death is a bestseller now

Many authors dream of the day they’ll see their books on top of a bestseller chart, but not all have that opportunity.

Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz falls into the latter camp, but not because his book didn’t climb high enough — it’s because it nabbed a top spot nearly eighty years after his death.

The BBC reports that Boschwitz wrote The Passenger in the late 1930s, but that it went out of print quickly; the author, meanwhile, died when the boat he was traveling on was torpedoed by the Germans during World War II.

Just recently, though, Boschwitz’s niece happened to read an interview about an editor who had discovered a different novel.

She wrote to Peter Graf, who immediately knew he wanted to re-release the book, which tells the story of a Jewish businessman who flees Nazi Storm Troopers.

His instinct was solid; The Passenger has now made the UK’s Sunday Times list of top 10 hardback fiction bestsellers.

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