When French novelist Patrick Modiano won the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature, he was not familiar to many American readers. Since then, quite a few translations have been published, some new, some re-issued. Modiano is best known in France for his focus on the Nazi Occupation, a period that ended just before his birth. In a lucid and haunting prose style, his novels explore the power of memory and seek traces of the past in contemporary life. Like many of Modiano’s narrators and protagonists, readers must become “detectives,” constantly seeking clues in order to discover and reveal hidden meanings. Modiano’s first three novels have recently been translated as The Occupation Trilogy. I would suggest, however, that readers new to Modiano start with Dora Bruder, a 1997 novel in which a narrator pieces together the story of an adolescent Jewish girl who ran away from home in 1941 and was captured and deported to Auschwitz.