Author(s): Patrick Modiano

Fiction

Jean Daragane is a writer and a recluse. As he enters his third month without contact with another living soul he receives a telephone call from a man who claims to have found his old address book. Though suspicious of his manner, Daragane agrees to meet his mystery caller, one Gilles Ottolini, who introduces his female confederate as Chantal Grippay. Together they interrogate Daragane about the names in his notebook, names he cannot always place, and, most disturbing of all, a name he only knows from his latest novel. Shepherded by Ottolini and Grippay - their motives as opaque as ever - Daragane begins to sift through a waste of lost years. Memories resurface of a house on the outskirts of Paris, a childhood where strangers came and went in the night while he was watched over by a woman whose past appears to be as obscured as his own.