The only children's story by 2014's winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Patrick Modiano, illustrated in full colour by celebrated artist Jean-Jacques Sempé.
The first novel by the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2014, which with }The Night Watch{ and }Ring Roads{ forms a trilogy of the Occupation. Modiano's debut novel; a sardonic, often grotesque satire of France under the Nazis, centred on a young Jewish man.
2014 Nobel Prize for Literature winner Modiano's first three novels about Paris under Nazi occupation, }La Place De L'Etoile{, }The Night Watch{ and }Ring Roads{, in a single volume. Will feature a new preface from William Boyd.
"Missing a young girl, Dora Bruder, 15, height 1.55m, oval-shaped face, grey-brown eyes, grey sports jacket, maroon pullover, navy blue skirt and hat, brown gym shoes. All information to M. and Mme Bruder, 41 Boulevard Ornano, Paris." The author chanced upon this notice in a December 1941 issue of Paris Soir. The girl has vanished from the convent school which had taken her in during the Occupation. She had apparently run away on a bitterly cold night at a time of especially violent German reprisals. Moved by her fate, the author sets out to find all he can about her. Eventually he discovers her name in a list of Jews deported to Auschwitz in September 1942 and what further fragments he is able to uncover about the Bruder family become a meditation on the immense losses of the period - people lost, stories lost, human history lost. Modiano delivers a moving survey of a decade-long investigation that revived for him the sights, sounds and sorrowful rhythms of occupied Paris. And in seeking to exhume Dora Bruder's fate, he in turn faces, and must come to terms with, his own family history.
