The book tells the story of Otto Silbermann, a respected German-Jewish business owner living in Berlin who has to leave his wife and flee his home in the immediate aftermath of the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938 as Nazi German soldiers pound on their door in the middle of the night.

[5] Regarding the sequence of different train rides that Silbermann takes in the novel, The Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland wrote that they were a "surreal, thickly claustrophobic atmosphere of an actual nightmare – a man repeating the same move over and over again, his goal permanently out of reach.

"[7] Writing for The Sunday Times, Arts and Leisure managing editor David Mills felt that The Passenger was potentially one of the greatest novels written about the Second World War.

[8] In a mixed review for the New York Times, author Michael Hofmann found The Passenger to be a "gripping" but "occasionally annoying" read that was the "work of a very young man, both urgent and perishable, written at some remove from the events and atmospheres it describes".

Reading the book, Hofmann was reminded "that the perpetually displaced Boschwitz was writing through the haze of distance and under the impress of his own, more harmless memories of Germany before his exile.

But Boschwitz has a knack for illustrating a particular brand of racist self-delusion in which the non-Jewish German characters deny any responsibility for the dark forces harrying Silbermann.