Our Fiction Book of the Month for October 2021
Shortlisted for The British Book Awards 2022 Fiction Book of the Year
Berlin,November 1938.
With storm troopers battering against his door,Otto Silberman must flee out the back of his own home. He emerges onto streets thrumming with violence: it is Kristallnacht,and synagogues are being burnt,Jews rounded up and their businesses destroyed.
Turned away from establishments he had long patronised,betrayed by friends and colleagues,Otto finds his life as a respected businessman has dissolved overnight. Desperately trying to conceal his Jewish identity,he takes train after train across Germany in a race to escape this homeland that is no longer home.
Twenty-three-year-old Ulrich Boschwitz wrote The Passenger at breakneck speed in 1938,fresh in the wake of the Kristallnacht pogroms,and his prose flies at the same pace. Shot through with Hitchcockian tension,The Passenger is a blisteringly immediate story of flight and survival in Nazi Germany.
Publisher: Pushkin PressISBN: 9781782275404Dimensions: 198 x 129 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
A fascinating historical rediscovery shed light on the closing borders and rising prejudices of current times... in a tense,rising nightmare that's timelessly relevantThis thriller's rediscovery has become an international publishing sensation,which feels like some restitutionPart John Buchan,part Franz Kafka and wholly riveting. It is also uncannily prescient (...) a gripping novel that plunges the reader into the gloom of Nazi Germany as the darkness was descendingThere have been a number of great novels about the Second World War that have come to light again in recent times,most notably Suite Franaise and Alone in Berlin. I'm not sure that The Passenger might not be the greatest of themGripping and viscerally affecting... Boschwitz's feel for his setting and characters makes most of the historical fiction written about the Nazi era seem simplistic and ersatzBy turns claustrophobic,dizzying and symbolic,The Passenger is a work with sufficient pace to be a thriller,yet possessed of enough nuance and psychological depth to be of real literary weightThis year's essential literary rediscoveryRemarkable... disabused,prophetic,and flawlessly penetratingAll too chillingly real. Originally published quietly in 1938,this reissue is now a deserving bestsellerA very welcome rediscoveryA highly accomplished work,filled with vivid characterisation,sharp dialogue and intensely observed scenes... This English edition,skilfully translated by Philip Boehm,is a fitting memorial to a writer of great insight and talent - and an important historical work that vividly recreates the terror experienced by Jews in 1930s GermanyThe Passenger is both a poignant soliloquy on the nature of sudden loss and uncertainty,and a vivid picture of what it was to be Jewish and hunted down as the Nazis embarked on their crusade of extermination... (Silbermann's) sense of terror and incomprehension is captured with a rare immediacyA riveting,noirish,intensely filmic portrait... a jewel of a rediscovery: At once a deeply satisfying novel and a vital historical documentThis rediscovered classic fizzes with frantic fear and energy'One of the year's great rediscoveries was this harrowing 1938 novel about a Jewish Berliner on the run after Kristallnacht'A Book of the Year'A shocking,moving and suspenseful story with a powerful resonance today'
Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz
Visit the Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz author pageAndre Aciman
André Aciman is an award-winning Egyptian-American author,best known for his internationally bestselling novel Call Me by Your Name.
Visit the Andre Aciman author page
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