Search Warrant, The: Dora Bruder

Description: 'Missing a young girl, Dora Bruder, 15, height 1.55m, oval-shaped face, grey-brown eyes, grey sports jacket, maroon pullover, navy blue skirt and hat, brown gym shoes. All information to M. and Mme Bruder, 41 Boulevard Ornano, Paris.' The author chanced upon this notice in a December 1941 issue of Paris Soir. The girl has vanished from the convent school which had taken her in during the Occupation. She had apparently run away on a bitterly cold night at a time of especially violent German reprisals. Moved by her fate, the author sets out to find all he can about her. Eventually he discovers her name in a list of Jews deported to Auschwitz in September 1942 and what further fragments he is able to uncover about the Bruder family become a meditation on the immense losses of the period - people lost, stories lost, human history lost. Modiano delivers a moving survey of a decade-long investigation that revived for him the sights, sounds and sorrowful rhythms of occupied Paris. And in seeking to exhume Dora Bruder's fate, he in turn faces, and must come to terms with, his own family history.

Review: "The most poignant, the strongest of all Patrick Modiano's works. From a small ad found in a Paris newspaper in 1941, the writer embarks on the hunt for a young Jewish girl Dora Bruder, a runaway who has disappeared into the dark night of the Occupation. Through this investigation, Modiano looks for Dora, but for his own father as well, also hiding in the Paris of that time. Absolutely magnificent." Le Monde "An exceptional book" JORGE SEMPRUN "This book is both harrowing and admirable...quite simply shattering" RENAUD MATIGNON, Figaro





Author Biography: PATRICK MODIANO was born in an outlying quarter of Paris in 1945. He published his first novel, La Place de l'Etoile, when he was 21, and has made a distinguished career as a novelist ever since, winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2014. He has won the Grand Prix du Roman de l'Academie Francaise and the Prix Goncourt. His fiction is haunted by the trauma of the German Occupation of France, and this subject also features in the screenplay of Lacombe Lucien which he wrote for the film director Louis Malle. JOANNA KILMARTIN is the translator and editor of Marcel Proust's Selected Letters: Volume Four, 1918-1922. She has been awarded the Scott-Moncrieff translation prize twice: in 1971 for Sunlight on Cold Water by Francoise Segan, and in 1974 for Bernadini's Terrace by Suzanne Prou.
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature The Search Warrant is the story of teenager Dora Bruder, who vanishes from her convent school during the Occupation of Paris, and one man's quest to uncover her fate and come to terms with his own family history. A heart-rending meditation on people, stories and human history lost during the Second World War.