"Nobel Prize-winning author and screenwriter Patrick Modiano recalls his post-WWII Paris youth . . . filled with the kind of live-by-their-wits characters who inform his work."--Megan O'Grady, Vogue

"Terse, yet somehow infinitely generous, Pedigree both enacts and accounts for Modiano's fraught relationship with memory and the past--his own and those of his country. It outlines the stakes of his literary practice and reveals the specific sufferings this practice entails."--Kaiama L. Gloverdec, New York Times Book Review

"[Modiano's] books . . . make up a system as beguiling and complete as any in contemporary literature. . . . In Pedigree, his memoir of his early life . . . he is preoccupied with the riddle of his father."--Alexandra Schwartz, New Yorker

"In this slim but potent volume . . . [Modiano] grapples with the ghosts of the past and the events that shaped the man and writer he would become."--Publishers Weekly

"This book will stay with readers long after its end and begs for rereading. . . . Echoes of the gray, bleak, yet resilient mood of François Truffaut's 1959 film The 400 Blows are felt throughout, perhaps because both works share post-World War II Paris as the setting. . . . A truly wonderful book."--Derek Sanderson, Library Journal (starred review)

"The only book that Modiano has explicitly identified as a memoir . . . [Pedigree] tells us that nearly all of the fictions would be true had the author not peopled them with his surrogates."--Joshua Cohen, Harper's

"For those familiar with and interested in Modiano's fiction, Pedigree is essential reading."--M. A.Orthofer, Complete Review

"[Pedigree] makes a powerful, lasting impression."--Michael Autrey, Booklist

"Brief and sharp, a pointillist interpretation of personal history."--James McAuley, New Republic

"Fascinating. . . . Much of the book surprises us with irresistible images. . . . Pedigree is an excellent introduction to one of the more enigmatic Nobel laureates in recent years."--Michael Magras, Book Reporter

"[Pedigree] gathers emotional power as the book progresses in this crystalline translation by Mark Polizzotti. . . . The memoir is a map, and once you've read it, you are no longer a tourist walking in the strange land of Modiano's fiction--now there are landmarks and familiar places you can revisit from a fresh angle."--Priyanka Kumar, Santa Fe New Mexican

"[Modiano], who won the Nobel Prize last year for a body of work as deft and beautiful as any in postwar European literature, is an excavator of memory. . . . [Pedigree] tells the story of the author's early years."--David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times

"For those coming anew to Modiano, reading Pedigree first might be a wise choice. His life, such as he tells it here, is as extraordinary and as bizarre as the situations of his fiction . . . [and] it also goes a long way to show what made him a writer."--J. P. Smith, The Millions

"Wonderfully served by an excellent translator, Mark Polizzotti. . . . In [Pedigree] we find the key to unlock the haunting, charged, atmospheric novels that preceded it. . . . The memoir reiterates the elusive qualities of the novels and, in its concern for shadows and fog, casts the mysterious lives of [Modiano's] parents as emblematic of a larger obscured history."--Jonathan Wilson, Los Angeles Review of Books

"The keys to unlocking Modiano are to be found between the covers of his memoir, Pedigree. . . . He builds his story, his case, forensically and deliberately, even dispassionately . . . giving Pedigree a haunting objectivity."--Liam Hoare, Jewish Review of Books