The narrator wanders the streets of Paris. He visits bars, flats, restaurants. He picks through fragments of information, old photos, partial conversations. He is trying to piece together events of which he has no memory, of something terrible that happened during the Second World War in which he is in some way implicated. He does not even know his own name.

One of the great modern French novels, Missing Person made Modiano's reputation, winning the Prix Goncourt. A hallucinatory vision of Paris and its secrets, it drifts through the city, accumulating clues, scraps and glimpses of blighted lives as the narrator obsessively hunts for his own erased past.