Frankie Fouganthin · CC BY-SA 4.0

Patrick Modiano has spent more than forty books circling the same subject: his own family's history and France's occupation during the Second World War, blending autobiography with historical fiction into what critics call autofiction. Comparisons to Marcel Proust follow him for the same reason — an obsession with memory and the past structures nearly everything he writes. Most of his novels weren't available in English until he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2014; he had already won France's Prix Goncourt in 1978.