An exploration of memory and loss, this literary hybrid seeks to explore the mystery of a 15-year-old girl who chose to run away from a convent in the Parisian winter of 1941. Complicating matters, the girl is the daughter of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, deep in the persecution of the government of occupied France.

Alongside this journey, the author also explores the past of both himself and his father (another persecuted under occupation). Part amateur detective story, Modiano came across Dora Bruder’s name in a missing persons headline in a December 1941 edition of the French newspaper Paris Soir. The book pieces together newspaper cuttings, vague testimonies and old telephone directories, looking at outsider living on the outskirts of the city.

On Bruder herself, he writes: “I shall never know how she spent her days, where she hid, in whose company she passed the winter months of her first escape, or the few weeks of spring when she escaped for the second time. That is her secret.”

As such, it’s a quiet, still book. Extremely powerful in the way it captures the transitory nature of life, especially a life caught up in powerful forces far bigger than any given individual. Indeed, the way in which Modiano pieced together the story from the scant bureaucratic record (and explores why Dora’s trace is so faint) is especially telling, given her (and her parents’) fate once rendered “stateless” by a government intent of ridding itself of “unwanted elements”.

Stylistically, this one reminds me of W.G. Sebald, weaving webs of suggestions and suppositions through a kind of cultural archaeology. Given that our central subjects are Jewish, and the time and place is Occupied France, the inevitable drift towards learning Dora’s fate makes for incredibly somber reading.