When Patrick Modiano was awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize for LIterature he was praised for using the `art of memory` to bring to life the Occupation of Paris during the Second World War. The Night Watch is his second novel & tells the story of a young man of limited means, caught between his work for the French Gestapo informing on the Resistance, & his work for a Resistance cell informing on the police & the black market dealers whose seedy milieu of nightclubs, prostitutes & spivs he shares. Under pressure from both sides to inform & bring things to a crisis, he finds himself driven towards an act of self-sacrifice as the only way to escape an impossible situation & the question that haunts him
- how to be a traitor without being a traitor. In this astonishing, cruel & tender book, Modiano attempts to exorcise the past by leading his characters out on a fantasmagoric patrol during one fatal night of the Occupation.