Read by Bronson Pinchot

A writer's notebook becomes the key that unlocks memories of a love formed and lost in 1960s Paris. In the aftermath of Algeria's war of independence, Paris was a city rife with suspicion and barely suppressed violence. Amid this tension, Jean, a young writer adrift, met and fell for Dannie, an enigmatic woman fleeing a troubled past. Half a century later, with his old black notebook as a guide, Jean retraces this fateful period in his life, recounting how, through Dannie, he became mixed up with a group of unsavory characters connected by a shadowy crime. Soon Jean too was a person of interest to the detective pursuing their case-a detective who would prove instrumental in revealing Dannie's darkest secret. The Black Notebook bears all the hallmarks of this Nobel Prize-winning literary master's unsettling and intensely atmospheric style, rendered in English by acclaimed translator Mark Polizzotti. Once again, Modiano invites us into his unique world, a Paris infused with melancholy, uncertain danger, and the fading echoes of lost love. "Bronson Pinchot elegantly narrates this mysterious novella. His fine French accent gives this brooding backward-glancing story by Nobel Prize winner Modiano a fine sense of time and place…Pinchot's nuanced narration of this brief work brings the listener into the complex past via Jean's black notebook…The energized Parisian street life of the 1960s is almost a character itself." "1960s Paris, a mysterious girl, a group of shady characters, danger…and sheer magic follows." "Ex-convicts, missing bullets, a detective with a long memory…carefully wrought and superbly fluid." "The prose-elliptical, muted, eloquent-falls on the reader like an enchantment…No one is currently writing such beautiful tales of loss, melancholy, and remembrance." "[A] magnificent novel that reawakens days long past, illuminating them with a dazzling light." "Pure Modiano…It's the strange atmosphere between the lines that makes the magic." "In settings that seem to rise from the mists of the Seine, he explores the limits of memory and the slipperiness of both past and present." "A short but potent novel that's as elegant as Claude Rains and as sinister as Peter Lorre…An atmospheric, smoky, sepia-toned whodunit."

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