Initially published as No Place to Lay One's Head - the unforgettable story of one woman's struggle to survive persecution in wartime FranceIn 1921, Françoise Frenkel-a Jewish woman from Poland-opens Berlin's very first French bookshop. It is a dream come true. The bookshop attracts artists and diplomats, celebrities and poets. It brings Françoise peace, friendship and prosperity. Then, in the summer of 1939, the dream ends and Françoise's desperate, headl...

**One man hunts obsessively for his lost identity, in this intoxicating noir masterpiece from the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature'Modiano is a pure original' Adam Thirlwell**'I am nothing. Nothing but a pale shape, silhouetted that evening against the café terrace, waiting for the rain to stop'Guy Roland, a private detective in Paris, is trying to solve the mystery of his own past. His memories erased by amnesia, he has no idea where he is from, or even his ...

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATUREAn alluring young woman is the center of attention at a French café in this deeply moving love story about identity, memory, time, and yearning, set in 1950s Paris.In the Café of Lost Youth is vintage Patrick Modiano, an absorbing evocation of a particular Paris of the 1950s, shadowy and shady, a secret world of writers, criminals, drinkers, and drifters. The novel, inspired in part by the cir...

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’...

What was I doing, at the age of eighteen, on the shore of that lake, in that fashionable spa resort? Nothing.At the outbreak of the Algerian war, a young man who calls himself Victor Chmara flees Paris for a small lakeside town on the border of France and Switzerland.It's here that he meets the flamboyant doctor René Meinthe and the mysterious auburn-haired Yvonne. Victor quickly embraces their world of pageants, soirées and late-night debauchery, and settles...

A NYRB CLASSICS ORIGINAL: The Nobel Prize winner’s breakthrough novel is an unforgettable story of love, yearning, and grief—now available in English for the first time.Young Once is a crucial book in the career of Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano. It was his breakthrough novel, in which he stripped away the difficulties of his earlier work and found a clear, mysteriously moving voice for his haunting stories of love, nostalgia, and grief. It has also been c...

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 ch...

Patrick Modiano, winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature, is the author of more than thirty books and 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 thirty years to a time when, having abandoned his studies and selling off old art books to get by, he comes to know Gérard Van Bever and Jacqueline, a young, enigmatic couple who seem to...

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 Da...

A critically acclaimed #1 bestseller in France—a novel of art, desire, and time lost and regained, from Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano“Pithy and introspective. . . . Modiano delivers wondrous images of the tricks memory plays, sharply translated by Polizzotti. . . . Readers will savor this wistful narrative.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)Paris, 1960s. A young dancer and single mother, who might or might not be the narrator...

**WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATUREMissing, a young girl, Dora Bruder, age 15.**One winter night in 1941, a Jewish girl runs away from her Paris boarding school. Stumbling across her disappearance listed in an old newspaper, Patrick Modiano finds himself propelled on a quest to exhume her fate.His search will go on to last a decade. Little more will be found, just fragments of a lost family history, a sense of the dark streets of occupied Paris, Dora’s name on...

'Brisk, smart, witty, elliptical **... Recalls the directors of the New Wave ...**Bracing and brilliant'IndependentWhen 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 satir...