Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano has said that his many fictions are all variations of the same story. Pedigree, his memoir, is the theme.

In this rare glimpse into the life of Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano, the author takes up his pen to tell his personal story. He addresses his early years—shadowy times in postwar Paris that haunt his memory and have inspired his world-cherished body of fiction. In the spare, absorbing, and sometimes dreamlike prose that translator Mark Polizzotti captures unerringly, Modiano offers a memoir of his first twenty-one years. “I am writing these pages the way one compiles a report or a résumé,” he writes, “as documentation and to have done with a life that was not my own.” Termed one of his finest books by the Guardian, Pedigree is both a personal exploration and a portrait of a world gone by.

Pedigree sheds light on the childhood and adolescence that Modiano explores in Suspended Sentences, Dora Bruder, and other novels. In this work he re-creates the louche, unstable world of his neglectful parents under the German Occupation; his childhood in a household of circus performers and gangsters; his harsh boarding school, which catered to “bastards, lost children”; and his formative friendship with the writer Raymond Queneau. While acknowledging that memory is never assured, Modiano recalls with painful clarity the death of his ten-year-old brother, Rudy. Pedigree, Modiano’s only memoir, is a gift to his readers and a master key to the themes that have inspired his writing life.