Just three years ago, searching for English translations of Irène Némirovsky's novels was a largely futile gesture; there weren't any in print. Only a few of her dozen-plus novels ever appeared in the U.S., and after her death in the Holocaust in 1942, Némirovsky was largely forgotten.

It wasn't until her posthumous novel, Suite Française—discovered in a notebook by her surviving daughter several years ago—was translated into English in 2006 that Némirovsky became a bestselling author on this side of the Atlantic. The French writer is one of the publishing industry's biggest—and most unlikely—success stories in recent years.

"It's very unusual for a translated and posthumous book to do as well as Suite Française," says Sara Nelson, editor in chief of Publishers Weekly. The book was an instant hit upon its release in France in 2004, selling more than 640,000 copies, according to its publisher, Denoel. Translated into 32 languages and published in 35 countries (with more still to come), the hardcover edition sold hundreds of thousands of copies. In the U.S. alone, 900,000 English versions have sold, says Random House, whose imprints Alfred A. Knopf and Vintage had the domestic rights. Both editions of Suite Française were New York Times bestsellers; the trade paperback edition alone occupied a spot on the list for over 30 consecutive weeks.

Be prepared for a Némirovsky flood over the next few years. Not surprisingly, publishers are trying to capitalize as much as possible on the book's popularity, releasing as many other versions and novels as possible. A museum exhibit opens this fall. The film rights to Suite Française were snapped up by Universal two years ago, though no plans for  production have been released.

According to publishing insiders, only a scant 3 to 4 percent of books published in the U.S. each year are translated from another language. "It's probably closer to 2 percent," says Dedi Felman, editor and vice-president of Wordswithoutborders.org, an online literary magazine that publishes and translates international literature and poetry.

Few of those have had tremendous success, and Némirovsky's sales figures already rank with bestselling contemporary writers. Take Colombian-born Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose One Hundred Years of Solitude published in English in 1970, and who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. In 2004, he got a boost from a force more powerful than the Nobel Academy—Oprah Winfrey. The edition with her seal of approval sold 658,000 copies.

Celebrated Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk is considered to have a strong audience in the U.S.; the hardcover edition of his 2004 novel, Snow, sold 42,000 copies here, according to Nielsen BookScan. Since then, the trade paperback edition of Snow has sold more than 342,000 copies in the U.S.—no doubt helped along by his 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature. Yet he's still nowhere near Némirovsky's numbers.

In the wake of her sales, Random House has wasted little time translating and publishing five other Némirovsky novels. In 2007, the publisher released another posthumous work, Fire in the Blood, in hardcover, which was discovered in archives by two biographers, Patrick Lienhardt and Olivier Philipponnat, and sold 24,000 copies (the paperback comes out in July). The company will issue the pair's biography, The Life of Irène Némirovsky, in the fall of 2009.

This past January, the publisher issued a single volume collection of four early novels —David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn, and The Courilof Affair—in an elegant, hardcover Everyman's Library edition, a higher-priced imprint usually reserved for classic works of modern-day masters. Némirovsky is already part of the Contemporary Classics series of the Everyman's Library, which includes novels from the likes of Salman Rushdie, Patricia Highsmith, Italo Calvino, and Toni Morrison.

"What the success of a single book like [Suite Française] means is that the rest of the author's backlist gets picked up and published," Felman says.

Which is why four more Némirovsky  novels are currently being translated into English: Dogs and Wolves, Jezabel, The Wine of Solitude, and All of Our Worldly Goods. Némirovsky's titles will continue to be published until 2010 or 2011.

"It only makes sense for a publisher to try to recapture their past successes," Nelson says. "If there are four more Némirovsky novels, they would be crazy not to publish them."

The story behind Suite Française could easily be a bestselling book or  movie itself (it will be the subject of an exhibition at New York's Museum of Jewish Heritage in September). Born in Kiev to a Jewish family in 1903, Némirovsky moved to France, studied at the Sorbonne, started a family, and became a celebrated novelist. She published more than a dozen books of fiction to much acclaim—critics compared her to Tolstoy and Balzac—and a few of her works were adapted into film. After the Nazis invaded France, she and her family, like the characters in Suite Française, hid in a small village in Burgundy, where she continued to write, scribbling away in a brown leather-bound notebook. In 1942, she was arrested by French police as a "stateless Jew" and deported to Auschwitz, where she died.

When her husband was arrested, he gave his daughter a leather valise with the notebook among its contents. For decades, the book was left unread—Denise couldn't bear to see her mother's diary of those final, fear-stricken months. When she finally did, she discovered that it was the first two parts of a five-part work, Suite Française.

"We're lucky to have this book," says Lexy Bloom, an editor at Vintage and Anchor, who has edited all of the U.S. paperback editions of Némirovsky's books. "It's a gem and a testament to the power of good literature."