“Dans le Cafe de la jeunesse perdue” is the story of Roland, a young man with literary aspirations, and an aloof beauty, variously called Jacqueline and Louki. The pair wander though Paris in the early 1960s in search of the parents they never had. The style of the book will be familiar to Modiano readers: here again we have a combination of geographical precision and chronological vagueness. Every event is pinpointed to a location (usually Paris) with the scrupulousness of a police report. But every area described is also imbued with layers of emotion – and this is where the creative blurring begins. In this book the Montmartre-Pigalle district, where Jacqueline grew up and met shady types during regular nightly escapes as a teenager, conjures up a clear sense of threat. The Latin quarter is a refuge where she can start afresh under a new name.