Missing Person

Patrick Modiano was born on the outskirts of Paris in 1945. He has written novels, plays and children's books. He also co-wrote the script for Louis Malle's film Lacombe Lucien.His novels include Place d'Etoile, The Night Watch, The Search Warrant (Dora Bruder), Ring Roads, Honeymoon and the three novellas collected as Suspended Sentences: Afterimage, Suspended Sentences and Flowers of Ruin. Missing Person (published in French as Rue des boutiques obscures) won Modiano the Prix Goncourt in 1978. The novel has since been translated into 32 languages. In 2014 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Delicate and cunning . . . Modiano's method is to sidle up to subjects of mystery and horror, indicating them without broaching them, as if gingerly fingering the outside of a poison bottle. . . He opens dark doors into the past out of a sunlit present.