Author(s): Patrick Modiano

Fiction

Patrick Modiano's early life was defined by the remarkable loves and lives of his mercurial parents, and by a tragedy that left an indelible mark. His mother, a beautiful Belgian who settled in Paris, struggled to find steady work as an actress, and her constant touring and auditioning left little time for looking after her two children. His father was an inveterate womaniser, who once stepped out with a former mistress of Lucky Luciano. He operated on the fringes of legality, running an import-export business from suspiciously opulent offices. His wartime activities had been murkier still. But for all his parents' indifference, it is the death of his younger brother, when Modiano is eleven, that cuts deepest, leaving a wound that can never be healed. Taking in a vast gallery of extraordinary characters from Paris' post-war years, Pedigree is at once a portrait of an age and of a childhood - a childhood replete with insecurity and sorrow that informed the oeuvre of France's new Nobel Laureate.