Patrick Modiano

2014 Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
Patrick Modiano opens Dora Bruder by telling how in 1988 he stumbled across an ad in the personal columns of the New Year's Eve 1941 edition of Paris Soir. Placed by the parents of a 15-year-old Jewish girl, Dora Bruder, who had run away from her Catholic boarding school, the ad sets Modiano off on a quest to find out everything he can about Dora and why, at the height of German...

"Modiano is an ideal writer to gorge on . . . A moody, delectable noir." — The New Yorker
"The best kind of mystery, the kind that never stops haunting you." — Entertainment Weekly
"A work of melancholic beauty . . . Sincere, shattering, magnificent." — L'Express
In the stillness of his Paris apartment, Jean Daragane has built a life of total solitude. Then a surprising phone call...

"Odile and Louis are leading a happy, bucolic life with their two children in the French countryside near the Swiss mountains. It is Odile's thirty-fifth birthday, and Louis's thirty-fifth birthday is a few weeks away. Then the story shifts back to their early years: Louis, just freed from his military service and at loose ends, taken up by a shady character who brings him to Paris to do some work for a friend who manages a garage; Odile, an aspiring...

Stolen jewels, black markets, hired guns, crossed lovers, unregistered addresses, people gone missing, shadowy figures disappearing in crowds, newspaper stories uncomfortably close and getting closer . . . this ominous novel is Patrick Modiano's most noirish work to date. Set in Nice-a departure from the author's more familiar Paris-this novel evokes the bright sun and dark shadow of the Riviera. Modiano's trademark ability to create a haunting atmosphere...

A young Frenchman's romance with a woman who lives off men. After stealing some money from a dentist, they go to London where she sleeps with various characters while he writes his first novel. One day she disappears for fifteen years. A study in character.

Revisits moments of the author's past to produce a spare yet moving reflection on the destructive underside of love, the dreams and follies of youth, the vagaries of memory, and the melancholy of loss. Writing from the perspective of an older man, the narrator relives a key period in his life through his relationships with several enigmatic women--Geneviève, Martine, Madeleine, a certain Madame Huberson--in the process unearthing his troubled relationship...

"Jean Bosman, now his early twenties, soon becomes aware of a set of disturbing coincidences involving an elusive woman, his childhood home, and a host of disquieting characters who seem inordinately interested in his past, for reasons he can't fathom. As he journeys into the echoes of memory, past and present become increasingly intertwined, forming a web spanning half a century"--