[1] In more than 40 books, Modiano has used his fascination with the human experience of World War II in France to examine individual and collective identities, responsibilities, loyalties, memory, and loss.
[6] Modiano's parents met in occupied Paris during World War II and began their relationship semi-clandestinely (they separated shortly after Patrick's birth).
[7] During the war years Albert did business on the black market and was allegedly associated with the Carlingue, the Gestapo's French auxiliaries which recruited its leaders from the underworld.
[8] The absence of his father, and frequently also of his mother who went on tour, brought him closer to his brother, Rudy, who was two years younger[7] and died of a disease at age 9.
Recalling this tragic period in his memoir Un Pedigree (2005), Modiano said: "I couldn't write an autobiography, that's why I called it a 'pedigree': It's a book less on what I did than on what others, mainly my parents, did to me.
It was Queneau who introduced Modiano to the literary world, giving him the opportunity to attend a cocktail party thrown by his future publisher Éditions Gallimard.
In 1968 at the age of 22, Modiano published his first book La Place de l'Étoile, a wartime novel about a Jewish collaborator, after having read the manuscript to Queneau.
[11] La Place de l'Étoile was published in English in August 2015 together with two other of Modiano's wartime novels, under the title, The Occupation Trilogy.
In Rue des Boutiques obscures (published in English as Missing Person), the protagonist suffers from amnesia and travels from Polynesia to Rome in an effort to reconnect with his past.
In Du plus loin de l'oubli (Out of the Dark), the narrator recalls his shadowy love affair in 1960s Paris and London with an enigmatic woman.
Dora Bruder is a literary hybrid, fusing together several genres — biography, autobiography, detective novel — to tell the history of its title character, a 15-year-old daughter of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, who, after running away from the safety of the convent that was hiding her, ends up being deported to Auschwitz.
As Modiano explains in the opening of his novel, he first became interested in Dora's story when he came across her name in a missing persons headline in a December 1941 edition of the French newspaper Paris Soir.
[14] He wrote by piecing together newspaper cuttings, vague testimonies and old telephone directories, looking at outsider living on the outskirts of the city.
Modiano's quiet, austere novels, which also include La Ronde de nuit, are described as reading like "compassionate, regretful thrillers.
"[15] Modiano's 2007 novel Dans le café de la jeunesse perdue is set in 1960s Paris where a group of people, including a detective of shady background, wonder what is or was the matter with a certain young woman called Louki, who, we are told on the last page, ended her life by throwing herself out a window.
[18] In Modiano's 26th book, L'Horizon (2011), the narrator, Jean Bosmans, a fragile man pursued by his mother's ghost, dwells on his youth and the people he has lost.
The novel not only epitomizes Modiano's style and concerns but also marks a new step in his personal quest, after a mysterious walkabout in Berlin.