Born at the close of World War II, 2014 Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano was a young man in his twenties when he burst onto the Parisian literary scene with these three brilliant, angry novels about the wartime Occupation of Paris. The epigraph to his first novel, among the first to seriously question Nazi collaboration in France, reads: "In June 1942 a German officer goes up to a young man and says: 'Excuse me, monsieur, where is La Place de l'Étoile?'...

The author documents his ten-year search for details about the life of a Jewish Parisian teenager who ran away from her Catholic boarding school and was ultimately deported to Auschwitz by the Nazis, describing the Paris of that time period and reminiscing on memory and loss.

"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...

"A PEOPLE BOOK OF THE WEEK WINNER OF THE JQ–WINGATE LITERARY PRIZE “A haunting tribute to survivors and those lost forever—and a reminder, in our own troubled era, never to forget.” —People An “exceptional” (The Wall Street Journal) and “poignant” (The New York Times) book in the tradition of rediscovered works like Suite Française and The Nazi Officer’s Wife, the powerful memoir of a fearless Jewish bookseller on a harrowing...