A swirling cacophony of characters in the tense, nervily hysterical world of the shady near-criminal types who stayed behind in Paris after the Nazis arrived … Powerfully Pinteresque, as characters bristle with menace and barely-contained violence

Sunday Times

Like a cartoon strip in prose, caricatural and explosive … A disturbing evocation of the terror and treachery of the Occupation, and a mordant reminder of the tense relationship between Jewishness and Frenchness

The Times

Self-consciously outrageous ... Conventions and pieties are torn to pieces in a manner befitting a book published in Paris in 1968 … The more Modiano you read, the more seductive his work becomes ... Hypnotic and compulsive

Duncan White, Daily Telegraph

Brisk, smart, witty, elliptical ... Recalls the directors of the New Wave – Godard, Truffaut, Louis Malle – as much as the opaque narrators of the nouveau roman … Frank Wynne captures this scattergun savagery with formidable bite … Bracing and brilliant ... Deepens the twilit mood of 1940s film noir or mid-period Graham Greene with an immersive intensity

Boyd Tonkin, Independent

A Marcel Proust of our time

Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy

Modiano is a pure original

Adam Thirlwell