An intoxicating noir masterpiece from the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. One man hunts for his lost identity in this combination of psychological suspense and literary elegance. Missing Person crafts an unforgettable journey into the heart of memory, loss, and the fictions we live. Guy Roland has lived for a decade without a past. His current self was crafted by his employer, Hutte, who originally met Guy as a client before welcoming him into his detective agency. Set against the backdrop of 1950s Paris, Modiano pulls the reader into a world where identity is always just out of reach.

'Brisk, smart, witty, elliptical ... Recalls the directors of the New Wave ... Bracing and brilliant' Independent When Patrick Modiano was awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature he was praised for using the 'art of memory' to bring to life the Occupation of Paris during the Second World War. Born in 1945, Modiano's brilliant, angry writings burst onto the Parisian literary scene and caused a storm. His first, ferociously satirical novel, La Place de l'Étoile , was remarkable in seriously questioning both Nazi collaboration in France and the myths of the Gaullist era. The Night Watch tells the story of a man caught between his work for the French Gestapo and for a Resistance cell. Ring Roads recounts a son's search for his Jewish father, who disappeared ten years previously. These brilliant, almost hallucinatory, evocations of the Occupation attempt to exorcise the past by exploring the morally ambiguous worlds of collaboration and resistance.

"A writer's notebook becomes the key that unlocks memories of a love formed and lost in 1960s Paris. In the aftermath of Algeria's war of independence, Paris was a city rife with suspicion and barely suppressed violence. Amid this tension, Jean, a young writer adrift, met and fell for Dannie, an enigmatic woman fleeing a troubled past. A half century later, with his old black notebook as a guide, he retraces this fateful period in his life, recounting how, through Dannie, he became mixed up with a group of unsavory characters connected by a shadowy crime. Soon Jean, too, was a person of interest to the detective pursuing their case--a detective who would prove instrumental in revealing Dannie's darkest secret. The Black Notebook bears all the hallmarks of this Nobel Prize-winning literary master's unsettling and intensely atmospheric style, rendered in English by acclaimed translator Mark Polizzotti. Once again, Modiano invites us into his unique world, a Paris infused with melancholy, uncertain danger, and the fading echoes of lost love"--

A haunting novel that probes the enigmas of time and memory, by Nobel Prize-winning author Patrick Modiano "Polizzotti's crisp and evocative translation keeps the reader hooked."-- Publishers Weekly In his acclaimed semi-autobiographical novella Suspended Sentences , Patrick Modiano recounted a dramatic season in his childhood, of the home he shared with sinister surrogate parents, the mysterious events that took place there, and an infamous heist that was never solved. In Scene of the Crime , Modiano conjures the aftermath of those years. A decade has passed, and Jean Bosmans, now in his early twenties, 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. With the taut suspense of a detective novel, this book slowly peels away layers of time and forgetfulness to reveal the haunting, threatening, ultimately tragic legacies of what we think we know about our lives.

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.

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 with his parents, his unorthodox childhood, and the unsettled years of his youth that helped form the celebrated writer he would become.

"As a boarding school student in the early 1960s, Patrick Modiano lived among the troubled teenage sons of wealthy but self-involved parents. In this mesmerizing novel, Modiano weaves together a series of exquisitely crafted stories about such jettisoned boys at the exclusive Valvert School on the outskirts of Paris: abandoned children of privilege, left to create new family ties among themselves. Misfits and heroes, sports champions and good-hearted chums, the boys of Valvert misbehave, run away, get expelled, and engage in various forms of delinquency and disappearance. They emerge into adulthood tragically damaged, still tethered to their adolescent selves, powerless to escape the central loneliness of their lives in an ever-darkening spiral of self-delusion and grim consequence"--Back cover.

"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 singer, at the mercy of the kindness and unkindness of strangers. They move through a Paris saturated with the crimes and secrets of the past but breathing hopes for the future; they find each other and struggle together to create what, looking back, will have been their youth"--

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. -- Amazon.com.