Nice girls

Author: Patrick Modiano Translation: Daniel Salha Literature: French Literature Number of pages: 301 Publisher: Abu Dhabi Tourism and Culture Authority Cover: Hardcover With this novel, Modiano established himself as a novelist of childhood paradise lost. In his other works, he depicts how this loss affected him and his only brother, who died early. In the current book, the perspective broadens to include an entire generation—his friends from school days—whom he returns to after twenty years to portray them in the world of boarding school, and then shows what they have become. In a passionate search and tender empathy, he sketches these mostly tangled paths and quietly recalls them through a handful of characters and a few representative models of his classmates and teachers—classmates of various nationalities and origins—who are all united by being abandoned, almost forgotten, by wealthy fathers or pretenders of wealth or generally dubious conmen. They entrusted them to the school and then disappeared from their lives. The novelist returns to them, alternating between memories of school days and depicting their different and similar situations after twenty years.