NIGHT WATCH, THE

When Patrick Modiano was awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize for LIterature he was prai
sed for using the 'art of memory' to bring to life the Occupation of Paris durin
g the Second World War. The Night Watch is his second novel and tells the story
of a young man of limited means, caught between his work for the French Gestapo
informing on the Resistance, and his work for a Resistance cell informing on the
police and the black market dealers whose seedy milieu of nightclubs, prostitut
es and spivs he shares. Under pressure from both sides to inform and bring thing
s to a crisis, he finds himself driven towards an act of self-sacrifice as the o
nly way to escape an impossible situation and the question that haunts him - how
to be a traitor without being a traitor.