"Perec was a haunted writer, haunted by his Jewish ancestry, by the Holocaust that coincided with his own orphaned childhood, by the death of his father in 1940 and his mother's disappearance in Auschwitz. Writing, for him, was an act of exorcism" Sunday Times "A strange and complicated book, a work of tremendous, silenced emotion" Observer "His brilliant and profound memoir-fantasy deserves to be recognised for what it is: a masterpiece" Guardian "The childhood story of 'W' carries Perec's confused conception of the concentration camps...bewilderingly sad" Independent "Perec was a polymathic genius, and his early death in 1982 (he was only 45) robbed France of its most dazzling experimental writer, one who tried everything and failed at nothing...He has, deservedly, become a cult in France, particularly with young Parisians, who instinctively (and rightly) identify him as the super-zapper, the biographer of their fragmented consumer culture, of which he was himself the creation." Glasgow Herald