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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

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Modiano´s debut novel is a sardonic, often grotesque satire of France during the Nazi occupation. We are immediately plunged into the hallucinatory imagination of Rapha‰l Schlemilovitch, a young Jewish man, torn between self-aggrandisement and self-loathing, who may be the heir to a Venezuelan fortune, may have lived during the Nazi Occupation, may have rubbed shoulders with the most notorious collaborators and anti-Semites of the time, may even have been the lover of Eva Braun. or he may have been none of these things. But at the centre of this vortex is ´La Place de l´Étoile´ - the Place of the Star - which is both the geographical and moral centre of Paris, and that place next the heart where French Jews were compelled to wear the yellow star, the symbol of their persecution.

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A Marcel Proust of our time Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy

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Patrick Modiano was born in Paris in 1945 in the immediate aftermath of World War Two and the Nazi occupation of France, a dark period which continues to haunt him. His parents were often absent, and his childhood was spent in various boarding schools. After passing his baccalauréat, he left full-time education and dedicated himself to writing, encouraged by the French writer Raymond Queneau. From his very first book (La Place de l´Étoile, 1968) to his most recent (Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier, 2014), Modiano has pursued a quest for identity and some form of reconciliation with the past. His books have been published in forty languages, while his screen plays include Lacombe Lucien (dir. Louis Malle, 1974). Among his many prizes are the Grand Prix du Roman de l´Académie fran‡aise (1972), the Prix Goncourt (1978) and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature (2012). In 2014 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Frank Wynne is a writer and award-winning literary translator. Born in Ireland he has lived and worked in Dublin, Paris, Amsterdam, London, Buenos Aires and currently lives in San José, Costa Rica. He has translated more than a dozen major novels, among them the works of Michel Houellebecq, Frédéric Beigbeder, Pierre Mérot and the Ivorian novelist Ahmadou Kourouma. A journalist and broadcaster, he has written for the Sunday Times, the Independent, the Irish Times, Melody Maker, and Time Out.

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