A critically acclaimed #1 bestseller in France—a novel of art desire and time lost and
regained from Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano “[Modiano’s] words conjure up the promise
of hidden worlds.”—Tobias Grey Financial Times “Pithy and introspective. . . . Modiano
delivers wondrous images of the tricks memory plays sharply translated by Polizzotti.”—
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.
