‘Gripping’ – Telegraph
‘Brilliant’ – Sunday Times
‘Riveting’ – Guardian

The devastating rediscovered classic written from the horrors of Nazi Germany, as one Jewish man attempts to flee persecution in the wake of Kristallnacht

BERLIN, NOVEMBER 1938. With storm troopers battering against his door, Otto Silbermann 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 Alexander 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 Hitckcockian tension, The Passenger is a blisteringly immediate story of flight and survival in Nazi Germany.

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 relevant

Guardian, Books of the Year

This thriller’s rediscovery has become an international publishing sensation, which feels like some restitution

The Times, Books of the Year

Part 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 descending

Guardian

There have been a number of great novels about the Second World War that have come to light again in recent times, most notably Suite Française and Alone in Berlin. I’m not sure that The Passenger might not be the greatest of them

Sunday Times

Gripping 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 ersatz

Telegraph

By 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 weight

Spectator

This year’s essential literary rediscovery

Guardian

Remarkable… disabused, prophetic, and flawlessly penetrating

All too chillingly real. Originally published quietly in 1938, this reissue is now a deserving bestseller

Daily Mail

A very welcome rediscovery

The Times

A 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 Germany

Financial Times

The 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 immediacy

TLS