[With the original promotional band announcing the Academie francaise prize] Modiano, Patrick. Les Boulevards de ceinture. Recit. Paris: Gallimard, 1972. In French.

Modiano, Patrick. Les Boulevards de ceinture. Recit. Troisieme roman de l'auteur, Grand prix du roman de l'Academie francaise 1972.
Paris : Editions Gallimard, 1972. 199 pages.
Edition originale (pour laquelle il n'a pas ete tire d'exemplaires sur grand papier). Present exemplaire du tirage acheve d'imprimer le 14 decembre 1972, posterieur au tout premier tirage du 21 septembre 1972.
Broche, couverture imprimee nrf, bande rouge d'annonce du prix conservee autour de la couverture.
***
Modiano, Patrick. Les Boulevards de ceinture (Ring Roads). A novel. Modiano's third novel, awarded the Grand Prix du roman de l'Academie francaise in 1972.
Paris : Editions Gallimard, 1972. 199 pp.
First edition (no large-paper copies were printed for this title). The present copy belongs to the printing completed 14 December 1972, later than the earliest printing of 21 September 1972.
Original printed nrf wrappers, with the red promotional band announcing the prize still present around the covers.
Wrappers good: scattered foxing and staining to both covers, small wear and a short split to the promotional band. Text block very good: clean, complete, binding firm.

The first edition of the novel that established Patrick Modiano, then only twenty-seven, as one of the most distinctive voices of his literary generation, and the book that brought him his first major recognition, the Grand Prix du roman de l'Academie francaise. The third of his so-called Occupation trilogy, following "La Place de l'Etoile" (1968) and "La Ronde de nuit" (1969), the novel follows a narrator's search for his father amid a group of black-market operators and drifters in a village on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau during the German occupation, developing the themes of memory, fractured identity, and an elusive, half-dreamed past that would define Modiano's entire subsequent body of work. The novel carries its author's own dedication to his younger brother Rudy, who died in childhood at the age of ten and to whom several of Modiano's early books are dedicated. Modiano went on to win the Prix Goncourt in 1978 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2014, becoming the fifteenth French writer so honored; his early novels, largely untranslated into English before the Nobel award, have since become closely watched items in the market for modern French first editions. No large-paper copies were issued for this title, so the ordinary printed wrappers constitute the edition in its entirety; the present copy belongs to a printing completed in mid-December 1972, after the Academie francaise prize was announced, and retains the ephemeral red paper band advertising the award, a feature that has not survived on many copies still in circulation.