Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas Audiobook

Quotes

• “Vividly translated by Mark Polizzotti…As good a place as any to enter the long, slow-moving river of Modiano’s fiction.”

  — New York Times Book Review

• “Modiano’s work is unknown to most North American readers, and this is as good an introduction as any. The stories here highlight his concerns as a chronicler of the Occupation years and the lean times leading up to 1968…Fictions with a moral bite, depicting a world in which everyone, it seems, is complicit in crimes not yet specified. Moody, elegant, and dour.”

  — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

• “These three atmospheric novellas demonstrate the range of reading pleasure afforded by Modiano’s approach and the dark romance of his Paris…Each first-person novella is also a portrait of the artist.”

  — Publishers Weekly

• “Modiano’s style, plain but elliptical and carefully wrought…Unforgettable.”

  — Booklist

• “This collection of three novellas is pure Modiano, with haunting evocations of a Paris long past. It’s a hazy blend of fiction and his own experiences as a child born at the end of the war…His sparse, beautiful prose distills a feeling and mood that remains with me.”

  — Cara Black, author of Murder on the Left Bank

• “Haunting. Like a master perfumer, Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano has crafted a signature scent: his unmistakable blend of nostalgia, grief, love, disquiet, Paris.”

  — Damion Searls, author of The Inkblots

• “Reading Modiano is like experiencing a very specific flavor you don’t encounter every day—saffron or asafetida, say. He’s direct and precise but also gently melancholy, like the squeezed essence of passing time. Mark Polizzotti’s translation expertly catches the timbre of his voice.”

  — Luc Sante, award-winning writer and critic