A trio of intertwined novellas from the 2014 Nobel laureate for literature

In this essential trilogy of novellas by the winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature, French author Patrick Modiano reaches back in time, opening the corridors of memory and exploring the mysteries to be encountered there. Each novella in the volume--Afterimage, Suspended Sentences, and Flowers of Ruin--represents a sterling example of the author's originality and appeal, while Mark Polizzotti's superb English-language translations capture not only Modiano's distinctive narrative voice but also the matchless grace and spare beauty of his prose.

Although originally published separately, Modiano's three novellas form a single, compelling whole, haunted by the same gauzy sense of place and characters. Modiano draws on his own experiences, blended with the real or invented stories of others, to present a dreamlike autobiography that is also the biography of a place. Orphaned children, mysterious parents, forgotten friends, enigmatic strangers--each appears in this three-part love song to a Paris that no longer exists.

Shadowed by the dark period of the Nazi Occupation, these novellas reveal Modiano's fascination with the lost, obscure, or mysterious: a young person's confusion over adult behavi∨ the repercussions of a chance encounter; the search for a missing father; the aftershock of a fatal affair. To read Modiano's trilogy is to enter his world of uncertainties and the almost accidental way in which people find their fates.

Winner of the Prix Goncourt
In this strange, elegant novel, winner of France's premier literary prize, Patrick Modiano portrays a man in pursuit of the identity he lost in the murky days of the Paris Occupation, the black hole of French memory.
For ten years Guy Roland has lived without a past. His current life and name were given to him by his recently retired boss, Hutte, who welcomed him, a onetime client, into his detective agency. Guy makes full use of Hutte's files - directories, yearbooks, and papers of all kinds going back half a century - but his leads are few. Could he really be the person in that photograph, a young man remembered by some as a South American attaché? Or was he someone else, perhaps the disappeared scion of a prominent local family? He interviews strangers and is tantalized by half-clues until, at last, he grasps a thread that leads him through the maze of his own repressed experience.
On one level Missing Person is a detective thriller, a 1950s film noir mix of smoky cafés, illegal passports, and insubstantial figures crossing bridges in the fog. On another level, it is also a haunting meditation on the nature of the self. Modiano's sparce, hypnotic prose, superbly translated by Daniel Weissbort, draws his readers into the intoxication of a rare literary experience. (Verba Mundi)

Patrick Modiano, the author of more than 20 books, is one of France's most admired contemporary novelists. Out of the Dark is a moody, expertly rendered tale of a love affair between two drifters. The narrator, writing in 1995, looks back 30 years to a time when, having abandoned his studies and selling off old art books to get by, he comes to know Girard Van Bever and Jacqueline, a young, enigmatic couple who seem to live off roulette winnings. He falls in love with Jacqueline; they run off to England together, where they share a few sad, aimless months, until one day she disappears. Fifteen years later, in Paris, they meet again, a reunion that only recalls the haunting inaccessibility of the past: they spend a few hours together, and the next day, Jacqueline, now married, disappears once again. Almost 15 years after that, he sees her yet again, this time from a distance he chooses not to bridge. A profoundly affecting novel, "Out of the Dark" is poignant, strange, delicate, melancholy, and sadly hilarious. Jordan Stump is an assistant professor of French at the University of Nebraska.

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 reprisals, she ran away on a bitterly cold day from the people hiding her. He finds only one other official mention of her name on a list of Jews deported from Paris to Auschwitz in September 1942.

With no knowledge of Dora Bruder aside from these two records, Modiano continues to dig for fragments from Dora's past. What little he discovers in official records and through remaining family members, becomes a meditation on the immense losses of the peroid—lost people, lost stories, and lost history. Modiano delivers a moving account of the ten-year investigation that took him back to the sights and sounds of Paris under the Nazi Occupation and the paranoia of the Pétain regime as he tries to find connections to Dora. In his efforts to exhume her from the past, Modiano realizes that he must come to terms with the specters of his own troubled adolescence. The result, a montage of creative and historical material, is Modiano's personal rumination on loss, both memoir and memorial.

'Qu'est-ce que tu dirais si j'avais tué quelqu'un? J'ai cru qu'elle plaisantait ou qu'elle m'avait posé cette question à cause des romans policiers qu'elle avait l'habitude de lire. C'était d'ailleurs sa seule lecture. Peut-être que dans l'un de ces romans une femme posait la même question à son fiancé. Ce que je dirais? Rien.'

« Encore aujourd'hui, il m'arrive d'entendre, le soir, une voix qui m'appelle par mon prénom, dans la rue. Une voix rauque. Elle traîne un peu sur les syllabes et je la reconnais tout de suite : la voix de Louki. Je me retourne, mais il n'y a personne. Pas seulement le soir, mais au creux de ces après-midi d'été où vous ne savez plus très bien en quelle année vous êtes. Tout va recommencer comme avant. Les mêmes jours, les mêmes nuits, les mêmes lieux, les mêmes rencontres. L'Éternel Retour. »

Quatre narrateurs (un étudiant de l’école des mines, un détective privé, l’héroïne et un de ses amants) construisent le portrait de Jacqueline Delanque ou Louki. Jeune femme ayant rapidement quitté son mari et qui flâne dans le Paris des années 50/60 en déversant ses souvenirs : une enfance difficile, un mariage raté et quelques amitiés avec des clients d’un café du quartier de l’Odéon : Le Condé.

This charming book will delight any child — or adult — who appreciates ballet, Paris, New York, childhood, and mystery (not necessarily in that order). The book's plot is deceptively simple: Catherine, the eponymous heroine, begins her story watching her own daughter demonstrate jazz steps in their ballet school on a snowy afternoon in New York. Memory takes her (and the reader) back to her childhood, spent in the tenth arrondissement of Paris. In her youth, Catherine lives with her gentle father, Georges Certitude, who runs a shipping business with his partner, a loud, failed poet named Casterade. The real partners in this story, however, are the father and daughter who share the simple pleasures of daily life: sitting in the church square, walking to school, going to her ballet class every Thursday afternoon.

Behind this gossamer storyline, Catherine Certitude is filled with mystery. Why did Georges change his name to Certitude? What kind of trouble with the law did Casterade rescue him from? Exactly what does Georges do, and what kind of deals is he always discussing with men in worn raincoats? Why did Catherine's mother, herself a ballerina, leave Georges to return to New York? That these mysteries remain mysteries is part of the book's charm. But that Catherine and her father love the ballet, music, and City of Lights, is certain.

Paris, 1960s. A young dancer and single mother, who might or might not be the narrator’s love interest, is revisited by menacing figures from her past, even as she tries to escape that past through her art. Set in the shimmering world of the Paris ballet, a world populated by giants such as Balanchine and Nureyev, Ballerina revisits the themes of memory, desire, and ineffable danger that have become hallmarks of Patrick Modiano’s fiction.
Focusing on the dancer’s troubled relations with her young son, her enigmatic involvement with the narrator, her mysterious past entanglements, and the tension between the narrator’s past and present selves, Modiano’s new novel is both a nostalgic evocation of the world gone by and a haunting exploration of time lost and regained.
In deceptively weightless prose, deftly translated by Mark Polizzotti, Patrick Modiano interrogates the clash of current and vanished realities, the paradox of growing older, and the spectral persistence of love.

From beloved storyteller and Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano, a masterly and gripping crime novel set in picturesque Nice on the Fre nch Riviera
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 is here on full display: readers descend precipitously into a world of mystery, uneasiness, inevitability.
A young couple in hiding keeps close watch over a notorious diamond necklace known as the Southern Cross. Its provenance is murky, its whereabouts known only to our hero and heroine, who find themselves trapped by its potential value—and its ultimate cost. Deftly Modiano reaches further and further into the past, revealing the secret histories of the two even as the pressurized present threatens to overwhelm them.