Patrick Modiano

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The Search Warrant

Modiano’s crowning as the Nobel Prize-winner for Literature aptly sees its republication. And so it should

The most poignant, the strongest of all Patrick Modiano’s works. From a small ad found in a Paris newspaper in 1941, the writer embarks on the hunt for a young Jewish girl Dora Bruder, a runaway who has disappeared into the dark night of the Occupation. Through this investigation, Modiano looks for Dora, but for his own father as well, also hiding in the Paris of that time. Absolutely magnificent.

This book is both harrowing and admirable...quite simply shattering

Dora Bruder

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE, 2014 
 
Haunted by the fate of Dora Bruder – a fifteen-year-old girl listed as missing in an old December 1941 issue of Paris Soir – Nobel Prize-winning author Patrick Modiano sets out to find all he can about her. From her name on a list of deportees to Auschwitz to the fragments he is able to uncover about the Bruder family, 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 his own family history. 
 
Translated by Joanna Kilmartin 
 
‘Absolutely magnificent’ Le Monde

Elegant, pocket-sized paperbacks, VINTAGE Editions celebrate the audacity and ambition of the written word, transporting readers to wherever in the world literary innovation may be found.

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, winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2014. 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. 
 
Joanna Kilmartin is the translator and editor of Marcel Proust's Selected Letters: Volume Four, 1918–1922. She has been awarded the Scott-Moncrieff translation prize twice: in 1971 for Sunlight on Cold Water by Françoise Sagan, and in 1974 for Bernadini's Terrace by Suzanne Prou.

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Patrick Modiano

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