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.