This early work by the Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano relates the story of Lucien Lacombe: a poor boy in Nazi-occupied France who, rebuffed in his efforts to enter the Resistance for a taste of war, becomes a member of a sordid, pathetic group of Fascist collaborators who join the Gestapo in preying upon their countrymen. When Lucien encounters the Horns, a Jewish family from Paris hiding in his provincial town, he must choose between the coarse appeal of violence and his emerging feelings of tenderness for the family's daughter, France.
