A pair of novels, long believed lost, written more than 60 years ago by a Russian exile in Paris about France during World War II surfaced just before Frankfurt and won a worldwide flurry of sales for the French publisher that rediscovered them—by way of the author's daughter. Sonny Mehta of Knopf, describing the books as "a major work in the canon of WWII fiction," won a keen auction for U.S. and Canadian rights here, and will publish them in one volume, called Suite Française, in fall 2006. Author Irene Nemirovsky, a Jew who fled the Russian revolution and built a reputation as a writer in Paris in the '30s, had written two of a planned series of four wartime novels when France's collaborationist Vichy government seized her and sent her to Auschwitz, where she died. Her daughters kept her manuscripts for many years in a suitcase, and it was not until recently that one of them, Denise, transcribed her mother's minute script and realized she had two completed novels, Storm in June and Dolce. The French house Editions Denoel published them last month to great acclaim, selling translation rights in no fewer than 12 countries, and the deal here was arranged by the French Publishers Agency in New York.