Ballerina

“Pithy and introspective. . . . Modiano delivers wondrous images of the tricks memory plays, sharply translated by Polizzotti. . . . Readers will savor this wistful narrative.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Paris, 1960s. A young dancer and single mother, who might or might not be the narrator’s love interest, is revisited by menacing figures from her past, even as she tries to escape that past through her art. Set in the shimmering world of the Paris ballet, a world populated by giants such as Balanchine and Nureyev, Ballerina revisits the themes of memory, desire, and ineffable danger that have become hallmarks of Patrick Modiano’s fiction.

Focusing on the dancer’s troubled relations with her young son, her enigmatic involvement with the narrator, her mysterious past entanglements, and the tension between the narrator’s past and present selves, Modiano’s new novel is both a nostalgic evocation of the world gone by and a haunting exploration of time lost and regained.

In deceptively weightless prose, deftly translated by Mark Polizzotti, Patrick Modiano interrogates the clash of current and vanished realities, the paradox of growing older, and the spectral persistence of love.