A hidden literary treasure of wartime France is taking the book world by storm, while reviving uncomfortable memories of French collaboration with the Nazis, more than 60 years after its author was sent to her death in Auschwitz.

Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Française, transcribed and edited by her elder daughter, who clung to the manuscript as a keepsake of her mother, has been sold to publishers in 17 countries in an extraordinary bidding war.

The book combines two novels, one dealing with the flight of Jews from Paris during the great exodus of 1940 and the second with the early period of Nazi occupation.

It has won acclaim from French critics, with calls for a posthumous award when the Goncourt prize, the country's premier book award, is announced next month.

Suite Française - the completed half of what Nemirovsky planned as the four-volume "work of my life" - is regarded by some commentators as the most important descriptive wartime writing since Anne Frank's Diaries.

From the appearance of her first novel, David Golder, in 1929, when she was 26, Nemirovsky was feted as the darling of Parisian literary society. But she was also a Jew, born in Kiev to a prosperous banker's family. When the Germans invaded France, Nemirovsky was deserted by almost all those who had previously sought her company and admired her work.

Despite appeals to the German ambassador to Paris and Marshal Petain, the leader of the puppet Vichy regime, she was arrested by gendarmes and deported to Auschwitz in July 1942, dying of typhus a month later at the age of 39.

Her conversion to Roman Catholicism as war broke out, and her family's move from Paris to Burgundy, failed to save her. Her husband, Michel Epstein, was detained later along with his two brothers and sister. They, too, perished, almost certainly in the Auschwitz gas chambers.

Nemirovsky's daughters, Denise and Elisabeth, were spared, apparently because they reminded a German officer of his own child. For the rest of the war, they were cared for by a Catholic woman who moved them from one safe house to another. In a suitcase carried on each of a dozen moves, Denise Epstein kept the leather-bound notebooks containing her mother's last writings.

"I never opened it until 1954," said Miss Epstein, now 75. "It made me angry to read it. Seeing my mother's wonderful lucidity just gave me a tremendous sensation of abandonment."

Not until the 1970s did she open the book "properly", after her Paris home was flooded and she decided to move it to the safety of a shelf.

The first novel, Storm in June, was typed. The second, Dolce, written as paper became scarce, was in minute handwriting.

Over the next 20 years. Miss Epstein painstakingly read and transcribed, over and over again, her mother's text.

"She could look inside the human soul and make music with her words. But it is only now that I can look at it as a reader rather than as my mother's daughter," she said.

The success of Suite Française is encouraging news for an American academic who researched his own biography of Nemirovsky only to be told it was not marketable.

Prof Jon Weiss, who lectures in French and 20th century French literature at Colby College, Maine, described Nemirovsky as "an enigma and an absolutely fantastic novelist of the 1930s".