Erich Maria Remarque: The Promised Land (Vintage Classics)

Vintage Classics, £16.99

Erich Maria Remarque is of course best known for his First World War novel All Quiet on the Western Front. This final, previously unpublished novel plays out during the Second World War. However, instead of soldiers' struggles on the battlefronts of Europe Remarque charts the fish-out-of-water travails of emigrants on the streets of New York. Remarque died before he could complete The Promised Land, but the four hundred pages he produced, superbly translated by the redoubtable Michael Hofmann, are enough to tell a fascinating and poignant tale about identity, adaptability and the trials of starting afresh.

After five years on the run from the Gestapo, the novel's hero washes up in America in the hot summer of 1944 with a fake passport, a cyanide capsule, little English, less money and many scars. Masquerading as Ludwig Sommer, he is first interned at the detention centre on Ellis Island and later released into the 'vast and dazzling crucible' of New York to sink or swim. Help comes quickly from a network of refugees, several of whom are friendly faces from his past life spent fleeing and resisting the Nazis.

This colourful cast of émigrés is the novel's main strength. We meet chief fixer Hirsch, who has swapped Underground derring-do in France for canny exploits on the streets of Manhattan; Koller, who compiles a 'bloodlist' of key Germans he plans to track down and punish once the war is over; Jessie, 'the protectress of the emigrants', whose Berlin salon constituted a who's-who of artists and intellectuals; 'Catholic Jewish schizophrenic' Lachmann, a Jew who sells rosaries; and Maria, an Italian model who hates Mussolini as much as Sommer hates Hitler: 'That makes us kind of negative allies,' he says, already smitten.

Home for Sommer is the faded Hotel Rausch, a haven for exiles managed by Moikov, 'a survivor of many revolutions'. Work entails assisting a mercenary art-dealer and sifting dross for valuables at the junk shop run by the charismatic Silver brothers - Sommer's art and antique expertise acquired from long nights spent hiding in a museum in occupied Brussels.

In recent years we have seen a spate of novels featuring non-New Yorkers roaming the city and regaling us with digressive thoughts and meditations on its history, topography and melting-pot populace - Joseph O'Neill's Netherland and Teju Cole's Open City being but two. While The Promised Land is also steered by a wandering outsider-looking-in, Sommer is more intent on interaction than introspection. Over coffee in a Czech café or harder stuff in bars and at parties, he and his acquaintances pool their old-world memories and new experiences, recount their recurring nightmares, rue their limbo existence as 'enemy aliens' and share their ever-present fears of deportation, dwindling health and possible Nazi victory.

Remarque paints a compelling group portrait, skillfully conveying 'the strangeness of the lost little diaspora'. Attention to detail comes via Sommer's hard-bitten cynicism and gimlet-eyed scrutiny. Porters and barkers stand outside strip-joints 'in wadded coats like Turkish generals'; a grinning lawyer resembles a 'hyena with too many teeth'; a decrepit Contessa, still traumatised by the Russian Revolution, sedates herself with vodka-and-Seconal 'cordials' - or for Sommer, 'the elixir of consolation.'

It is entrancing watching Sommer attempting to fit in and settle down. He starts out baffled ('America's at war!' - yet there are no soldiers on the streets or smouldering ruins) and, on a visit to New York's German neighbourhood, is repulsed ('any one of those individuals, stuffing themselves on whipped cream or Frankfurter ring cake with shining eyes, could be transformed into a werewolf in a death squad'). Equally riveting are the flashbacks to the fugitive life he left behind, from the thrills of hazardous border-crossings and letter-drops to the horrors of interrogation cells and concentration camps.

Even as he makes inroads and gets bite after bite of the Big Apple, Sommer is still haunted by the past. The more he feels, the more he reveals, and each account of loss and suffering renders him all the more human and, as a result, credible.

Just as convincing, at times exhilarating, is Remarque's depiction of 1940s New York. During the war Remarque was exiled there (unlike Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht who ended up in California) and it is tempting to read many of Sommer's adventures as his own. However, whether they are more fact or fiction is of no real consequence. What matters is that we finally have this wonderful book.