Patrick Modiano Books

A classic French story from Nobel Prize-winner Patrick Modiano and celebrated illustrator Jean-Jacques Sempé. Beautifully illustrated, this is a love letter to Paris, ballet and childhood for fans of The Little Prince, Le Petit Nicholas and Madeline.Catherine lives with her gentle father, Georges Certitude, who runs a shipping business in Paris with a failed poet named Casterade. Father and daughter share the simple pleasures of daily life: sitting in the church square, walking to school, going to her ballet class every Thursday afternoon. But just why did Georges change his name to Certitude? What kind of trouble with the law did Casterade rescue him from? And why did Catherine's ballerina mother leave to return to New York?

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE, 2014Haunted by the fate of Dora Bruder - a fifteen-year-old girl listed as missing in an old December 1941 issue of Paris Soir - Nobel Prize-winning author Patrick Modiano sets out to find all he can about her.

Patrick Modiano explores the boundaries of recollection in his tenth book published by Yale University Press

Presents three short novels which explore the influence of the past, the complexities of human relationships, and the mysterious power of Paris over its residents and visitors.

An amnesic protagonist embarks on a quest for self-discovery, journeying from the idyllic landscapes of Polynesia to the historic streets of Rome. Through this exploration, the narrative delves into themes of memory, identity, and the search for belonging. Patrick Modiano, a Nobel Prize-winning author, weaves a compelling tale that captures the essence of human experience and the elusive nature of personal history.

The newest best-seller by Patrick Modiano: a beautiful tapestry that brings together memory, esoteric encounters, and fragmented sensations

The elegant, haunting story of the forgotten people and places of Paris from the reigning Nobel Laureate.

A haunting novel that probes the enigmas of time and memory, by Nobel Prize–winning author Patrick Modiano

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 just after the war, Modiano was an angry young man in his twenties when these three brilliant, angry novels burst onto the Parisian literary scene and caused a storm.The epigraph to his ambitious first novel, among the first to seriously question both wartime collaboration in France and the myths of the Gaullist era, reads: 'In June 1942 a German officer goes up to a young man and says: 'Excuse me, monsieur, where is La Place de l'�toile?' The young man points to the star on his chest.' The Night Watch tells the story of a young man, caught between his work for the French Gestapo, his work for a Resistance cell informing on the police and the black market dealers whose seedy milieu he shares. Ring Roads recounts Serge's search for his father, who disappeared from his life ten years earlier. He finds him trying to survive the war years in the unlikely company of spivs, anti-Semites and prostitutes, putting his meagre business skills at the service of those who have no interest in him or his survival. These brilliant, almost hallucinatory evocations of the Occupation, attempt to exorcise the past by exploring the morally ambiguous worlds of collaboration and resistance.

This novel by Nobel Prize–winning author Patrick Modiano is one of the most seductive and accessible in his oeuvre: the story of a man’s memories of fleeing responsibility, finding love, and searching for meaning in an uncertain world The narrator of Villa Triste, an anxious, roving, stateless young man of eighteen, arrives in a small French lakeside town near Switzerland in the early 1960s. He is fleeing the atmosphere of menace he feels around him and the fear that grips him. Fear of war? Of imminent catastrophe? Of others? Whatever it may be, the proximity of Switzerland, to which he plans to run at the first sign of danger, gives him temporary reassurance. The young man hides among the other summer visitors until he meets a beautiful young actress named Yvonne Jacquet, and a strange doctor, René Meinthe. These two invite him into their world of soirees and late-night debauchery. But when real life beckons once again, he finds no sympathy from his new companions. Modiano has written a haunting novel that captures lost youth, the search for identity, and ultimately, the fleetingness of time.