Paris, 1965. Rue des boutiques obscures begins with two haunting sentences: « Je ne suis rien. Rien qu'une silhouette claire, ce soir-là, à la terrasse d'un café. » The narrator, Guy Roland, experienced a mysterious accident fifteen years earlier, rendering him amnesic and erasing all traces of his own history. When his boss retires, Guy, who is a private detective, decides to embark on a quest to investigate his own past and reclaim his lost identity. His journey commences by following tenuous trails that lead back before the Second World War. Gradually, he reconstructs his life from fragments and testimonies of friends from his youth, painting a chiaroscuro portrait of the man he once was. Memories resurface, including a curious address in Rome, Italy.

To the question 'Who am I?' Patrick Modiano (b. 1945) always provides an opaque, obscure answer, transforming his readers into wandering souls akin to his characters—always uncertain, taking shape like elusive silhouettes. Rue des boutiques obscures is part detective novel, part identity quest, and stands as one of Modiano's masterpieces, earning him the prestigious Prix Goncourt upon its 1978 publication—a premonition of the Nobel Prize he received in 2014. As a writer of memory and interiority, Modiano is quintessentially Parisian and French, with his obsessions steeped in the specter of war and collaboration, lurking within the memories of people and streets.