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German author Frank Schaetzing, who has sold the rights to his 2004 ecological thriller "The Swarm" to Uma Thurman, said Thursday that his book was not only a bestseller but a lifesaver.
Schaetzing said at the Frankfurt Book Fair that he had met at least 60 people who said they were able to escape the 2004 Asian tsunami because they had read the book, which deals with the revenge taken by intelligent marine life for abuse of the environment.
The writer, 49, said an Austrian man told him he had been on a beach in southeast Asia reading a passage in "The Swarm" in which the sea dramatically recedes to form the killer wave when the same thing happened in front of him.
"He started screaming at everyone" to flee the beach immediately and managed to rescue several from the tsunami, which claimed the lives of some 220,000 people, Schaetzing said.
"The Swarm", which jostled its way past "The Da Vinci Code" to the top of the German bestseller list and stayed there for months, has now been translated into about 20 languages.
Thurman, the 36-year-old star of "Pulp Fiction" and the "Kill Bill" films, bought the rights to the novel in May along with two German film producers.
Schaetzing was in Frankfurt to promote his new science fiction novel "News from an Unknown Universe". The fair, the publishing world's largest annual gathering, runs through Sunday.
dlc/gj/ec
AFPEntertainment-literature-Germany-environment-tsunami
AFP 051139 GMT 10 06
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