It's hard to see how anyone is ever going to better this User's Manual to the life of Georges Perec" -Gilbert Adair, Sunday TimesWinner of the Prix Goncourt for Biography, 1994George Perec (1936-82) was one of the most significant European writers of the twentieth century and undoubtedly the most versatile and innovative writer of his generation.David Bellos's comprehensive biography - which also provides the first full survey of Perec's irreverent, polymathicoeuvre -explores the life of an anguished, comical and endearingly modest man, who worked quietly as an archivist in a medical research library. The French son of Jewish immigrants from Poland, he remained haunted all of his life by his father's death in the war, fighting to defend France, and his mother's in Auschwitz-Birkenau. His acclaimed novelA Void(1969) - written without using the letter "e" - has been seen as an attempt to escape from the words "pre", "mere", and even "George Perec".His career made an auspicious start with