This year’s Nobel laureate in literature, Patrick Modiano, wrote the three novellas in this collection as separately published works between 1988 and 1993. Each piece is a first-person narrative told by a man who, like Modiano, was born in 1945 and who reflects on his life in France in the two decades after the end of the Nazi Occupation. The stories involve a photographer with a murky past, black marketeers and a mysterious murder-suicide.