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Your next favorite book
is waiting.
by Patrick Modiano
A haunting novel of suspense from the winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature
In the stillness of his Paris apartment, Jean Daragane has built a life of total solitude. Then a surprising phone call shatters the silence of an unusually hot September, and the threatening voice on the other end of the line leaves Daragane wary but irresistibly curious. Almost at once, he finds himself entangled with a shady gambler and a beautiful, fragile young woman, who draw Daragane into the mystery of a decades-old murder. The investigation will force him to confront the memory of a trauma he had all but buried.
With So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood Patrick Modiano adds a new chapter to a body of work whose supreme psychological insight and subtle, atmospheric writing have earned him worldwide renown — including the Nobel Prize in Literature. This masterly novel, now translated into twenty languages, penetrates the deepest enigmas of identity and compels us to ask whether we ever know who we truly are.
"Modiano's text rewards the patient reader - as this time-hopping account of coincidences, uncertainties, and echoes of a half-forgotten history unfolds, "the present and the past merge together," building toward a powerful, memorable conclusion." - Publishers Weekly
"Lyrical and portentous - and sometimes even "dreary and threatening," as Daragne describes the voice at the other end of the line. Vintage Modiano, and a pleasure for fans of neonoir fiction." - Kirkus
"Expect interest, just not from your standard-issue murder mystery fans." - Library Journal
This information about So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Patrick Modiano was born in 1945 in a suburb of Paris and grew up in various locations throughout France. In 1967, he published his first novel, La Place de l'étoile, to great acclaim. Since then, he has published over twenty novels - including the Goncourt Prize–winning Rue des boutiques obscures (translated as Missing Person), Dora Bruder, and Les Boulevards des ceintures (translated as Ring Roads)—as well as the memoir Un Pedigree and a children's book, Catherine Certitude. He collaborated with Louis Malle on the screenplay for the film Lacome Lucien. In 2014, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy cited "the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the Occupation," calling him "a Marcel Proust of our time."
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