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."