WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

Missing, 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 a list of those sent to Auschwitz. And the spectre of Modiano’s own troubled past, from which he can no longer look away.

‘One of France’s most important novelists’ The New York Times

'[A] spokesman for the disappeared’ Guardian

Patrick Modiano was born in an outlying quarter of Paris in 1945. He published his first novel, La Place de l'Étoile, when he was 21, and has made a distinguished career as a novelist ever since. He has won the Grand Prix du Roman de l'Académie Française and the Prix Goncourt. His fiction is haunted by the trauma of the German Occupation of France, and this subject also features in the screenplay of Lacombe Lucien which he wrote for the film director Louis Malle.