Patrick Modiano, one of France's most acclaimed contemporary novelists, was awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature. Mark Polizzotti has translated more than fifty books from the French, including nine others by Modiano.
It is as a delineator of the labyrinths of human consciousness that Modiano excels. You feel the desperation with which the characters tug at the locked doors of their memories, and find yourself becoming more conscious of, and disturbed by, your own memory's lacunae. -Jake Kerridge, The Daily Telegraph Modiano's elliptical detective novels are less whodunit, more whodunwhat. -The Daily Telegraph 'Paperbacks Read This Week' The French Nobelist mines familiar preoccupations to mesmerising effect in his latest novel...The city of light is marvellously evoked, a metropolis dense with mystery, teeming with ghosts from its often wilfully forgotten past. -Hephzibah Anderson, The Observer With Modiano, the repressed always returns-but only in flickers and whispers at the edge of perception. His spare, elliptical prose-translated again with finesse and panache by Mark Polizzotti-casts its glow of mystery and menace over the tiniest detail. -Boyd Tonkin, Spectator Finalist for the Translation Prize, fiction category, sponsored by the French American Foundation In Invisible Ink, Patrick Modiano speaks magnificently about the relationship between writing and forgetting, the strata of memory that constitute a being. -Raphaelle Leyris, Le Monde des Livres Hauntingly memorable and evocative. -Edward Ousselin, World Literature Today Breathtakingly beautiful -Nelly Kaprielian, Les Inrockuptibles A refined and dazzling style . . . The end is emotionally gripping -Marie-Laure Delorme, Le Journal du Dimanche A foggy and magnetic novel -Jerome Garcin, L'Obs