In the aftermath of Algeria's war of independence, Paris was a city rife with suspicion and barely suppressed violence. Amid this tension, Jean, a young writer adrift, met and fell for Dannie, an enigmatic woman fleeing a troubled past. A half century later, with his old black notebook as a guide, he retraces this fateful period in his life, recounting how, through Dannie, he became mixed up with a group of unsavory characters connected by a shadowy crime. Soon Jean, too, was a person of interest to the detective pursuing their case --- a detective who would prove instrumental in revealing Dannie's darkest secret.

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 him into the mystery of a decades-old murder. The investigation will force Daragane to confront the memory of a trauma he had all but buried.

The narrator of VILLA TRISTE, an anxious, roving, stateless young man of 18, arrives in a small French lakeside town near Switzerland in the early 1960s. He is fleeing the atmosphere of menace he feels around him and the fear that grips him. However, the proximity of Switzerland, to which he plans to run at the first sign of danger, gives him temporary reassurance. The young man hides among the other summer visitors until he meets a beautiful young actress named Yvonne Jacquet, and a strange doctor, René Meinthe. These two invite him into their world of soirees and late-night debauchery. But when real life beckons once again, he finds no sympathy from his new companions.

PEDIGREE is a memoir, written in 2005 and now translated from the French, by Patrick Modiano, winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize for literature. The book focuses on Modiano’s first 21 years, from 1945 to 1966, and includes ruminations on events he has explored in his fiction --- from his father’s shady business dealings during and after World War II to the years Modiano spent in boarding schools, and the books and films that shaped him as writer.

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.