Product DescriptionBerlin, 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.ReviewRemarkable... disabused, prophetic, and flawlessly penetrating -- André AcimanA very welcome rediscovery -- James Owen ?The TimesA story that is 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. It deserved to be read when it was written. It certainly deserves to be read now -- Jonathan Freedland ?GuardianThere 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 -- David Mills ?Sunday TimesThis year's essential literary rediscovery ?GuardianGripping 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 -- Jake Kerridge ?TelegraphA powerful book that truly captures that experience of being stripped of who you are -- Lisa Appignanesi, author of Everyday MadnessBy 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 -- Bryan Karetnyk ?SpectatorA German-Jewish author killed by the Nazis is to become a bestseller after the book he wrote on living under the regime was rediscovered by publishers... [The] powerful novel he wrote in 1938, a prophetic and chilling portrait of life under the Nazis, is expected to find new readers across the world ?TelegraphAll too chillingly real. Originally published quietly in 1938, this reissue is now a deserving bestseller ?Daily MailThe 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 -- Caroline Moorhead ?TLS[An] existential exploration of the self, apathy, and moral decay. It is a book that gets under your skin [...] This book is a timely eye-opener and certainly worth one's attention and admiration -- Adam Matthews ?RTEA taut and chilling story ?CultureflyWith The Passenger alone, Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz claims a place alongside the likes of Thomas Mann, Heinrich Böll and Hans Fallada as one of 20th century Germany's greatest novelists -- Charlie Connelly ?The New EuropeanA remarkable rediscovery ?ExBerliner MagazineAt times The Passenger reads as though a painting by the German anti-Nazi artist George Grosz has been turned into words, the text almost vibrating with fury at the lies, theft, murder and betrayal. It is also 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 an