From a New York Times obit by William Grimes headlined “D.M. Thomas, 88, Dies; His ‘White Hotel’ Was a Surprise Best Seller”:

D.M. Thomas, the English novelist whose ingenious interweaving of Freudian themes and the Holocaust made “The White Hotel” a surprise best seller in 1981, died at his home in Truro, a small city in the Cornwall region of southern England.

Mr. Thomas was a former English teacher with a modest literary reputation when he began planning a novel in the style of a Freudian case study. By chance, he began reading Anatoly Kuznetsov’s documentary novel “Babi Yar,” about the slaughter of 100,000 mostly Jewish Ukrainians near Kiev in 1941, and the light bulb went on.