A little girl is returning from the beach, at dusk, with her mother. She is crying for no reason at all, because she would have liked to continue playing. She moves off into the distance. She has already turned the corner of the street, and do not our lives dissolve into the evening as quickly as this grief of childhood?

An author who keeps reappearing on my radar is Patrick Modiano, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature back in 2014. I read his book “Search Warrant” in 2015 and did get a lot from it, though I found myself struggling a bit with whether it was autofiction or what… I’ve always hesitated a little when considering whether to try another of his works, but when I was in London last month I came…

Patrick Modiano, Entrevista, 2014

With the passing of the years, each neighbourhood, each street in a city evokes a memory… the topography of a city becomes your whole life, called to mind in successive layers as if you could decipher the writings superimposed on a palimpsest.

-- Patrick Modiano